556: Apple Chips Are People
12 Oct 2023The Rewind Pendant, alcantara in new places, using AirPods Pro at a concert, why schools love Chromebooks, and a thousand-year optical-disc journey.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Overall St. Jude winner: James Neal
- John’s window bug
- Macs vs. Chromebooks in education (via John Weston & Steve Ligett)
- John gets his Photos.app wish
- Off-center holes aren’t new
- Alcantara iPhone cases
- Casey’s ★★★★☆ iPhone case
- In defense of the utterly ridiculous Razer phone coolers (via Adam)
- Revisiting tire pressure management systems (via Mattias Lindblad)
- Casey’s adventures with stop-charging-at-80%
- AirPods Pro 2 as concert earplugs
- Rewind.ai Pendant
#askatp:- What makes Apple’s designs so much better? (via Buckaroo Ponzi)
- Do we segregate our user data? (via Alfred Flynn)
- How can an iPad-first user back up their photos? (via Joseph Zoller)
- Post-show: An optical-disc journey
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Chapters
- Common-law CMS rules
- James Neal does it again!
- John’s bug
- Why schools love Chromebooks
- John’s enhancement request
- Sponsor: Clean Email
- Off-centered holes (for off-centered people)
- Alcantara cases and podcast logos
- Thin cases
- Thermoelectric phone fans
- Tire-pressure monitors
- Sponsor: Memberful
- 80%-charge-limit setting
- AirPods Pro as concert earplugs
- Rewind.ai Pendant
- Sponsor: Kolide
- #askatp: Why Apple’s chips are good
- #askatp: Partitions for user data
- #askatp: iPad photo backup
- Ending theme
- An optical-disc journey
Common-law CMS rules
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John while you’re taking over this CMS. Can you make it so that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button that does new episode? Automatically disables as soon as it’s tapped checked
⏹️ ▶️ John so you know the story of the accomplished children don’t have shoes I will do things for the end user
⏹️ ▶️ John but for us. I’ll just say be careful and click in Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fine oh man John you should be able to do like a like, you know conflict save detection Yeah, let’s not get crazy here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe you could do a whole Google Docs, like you know, live editing thing. Just re-implement Sub-Etha edit all, you know. How hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Small matter of programming.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ugh, I just, yeah, well. I did fix one incorrectly curled apostrophe,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m really doing the important work. It’s been in there for how long? For how many years?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not gonna tell anybody where it is, but it’s there. Oh my God, that’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also find it hilarious and completely predictable how quickly Marco completely divorced himself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the CMS because John touched it twice and Marco was like, well, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not signing the divorce papers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, so John now has access to the Stripe account, which he had access before, sort of. So now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John has access to the Stripe account. He has access to the source code. He can run it. He can push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. The only thing I haven’t given you access yet is just to be able to log into the server and update the live site.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s something we can do in like 10 minutes. So let’s just do that. I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I don’t want that access.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you care the most about the CMS, and you touched it last. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by common law rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s just so much stuff in this stack that’s all your stuff that I don’t need to know about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not that important. You’re right, you don’t need to know about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re looking at my PHP framework from 1,000 years ago. You don’t need to know most of that stuff. You’re not using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m talking about all the servers and the stuff they run on, and all the DNS they’re running, and the networking and what machines they’re on and all that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. I don’t know about any of that. I don’t need to know about any of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This runs on one server. Our site isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John big. Anyway, this is going to pass back through you on its way out the door, just FYI. Be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can even do what I do. Like, right before I deploy something big, I first update neutral,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s a lot less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey traffic, and if it breaks, it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem, really. So neutral is my test bed for all of our CMS updates first. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first do it there, and then I, okay, now that works. Okay, now we’ll do it on ATP. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s very clear, shotgun rules, like first out the door, the car has to be in sight. Similarly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CMS rules, whoever touched it last, it’s yours. That’s it, you touched it, it’s now your problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the whoever smelt it dealt with of programming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And once you also roll in, whoever cares the most wins. You both care the most and touched it last.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I feel like I have an ironclad case here, this is yours. You’re gonna care too.
⏹️ ▶️ John I? Because you don’t want the site to break.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but caring about not breaking is different from, you know what, it’d be really nice if we added this one little feature
⏹️ ▶️ John but you just have to look at the changes I did and make sure it works. And find out all the things that, oh, you didn’t know about this
⏹️ ▶️ John or you didn’t know about that or this is, you know, just even as simple as making dumb mistakes in PHP all the way down to,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, this is gonna destroy everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s a good thing that you left QA up to me, the best tester in the group.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just need to do code review,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and then, yes, you do a
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of QA. Because you need to have at least one other person try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My QA is I go to the site and type, is I go to the server and type Git pull, and just refresh the page and see what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breaks. Brrr. Brr. Brr. Brr. Brr.
James Neal does it again!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, let’s do some follow-up. We forgot to mention last episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we had an unbelievable contribution to the St. Jude fundraiser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it completely slipped our minds, or maybe we didn’t know about it until after the fact. Let’s go with that, even though I think we might have. But let’s go with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we didn’t know about it until after the fact. But James Neal has for the second consecutive year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only has James matched our donation, but James has matched our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey donations, plural. So James has, for the second consecutive year, to the best of my recollection,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matched the entirety, the sum total of all of ATP. So this, well, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to say this past year, but the month that just ended, James donated $21,011.01.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So kudos to James. I have offered stickers. James basically, forevermore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you ever want a sticker, I don’t care what time of year it is, you just let me know and stickers will be in the mail. But that is absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phenomenal. I would never in a trillion years expect any other listener to get to this level.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’m not saying you can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John JMW Individual corporations can. Like 1Password, I think, donated more than that at one point. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, businesses,
⏹️ ▶️ John hop on board. You might get a sticker too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JS Yeah, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one sticker for your whole business. I kid, I kid. But anyway, thank you all. All kidding aside, and I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we said we weren’t going to talk about this anymore, but that was such an incredible donation that sorry, not sorry. Thank you, James, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your phenomenal donation. I will not expect it for next year, but I would love it if it So here’s hoping.
John’s bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you’ve had a lot of people trying your window management,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever bug, what’s going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the first thing I want to say is that word on the street is that Apple is going to fix
⏹️ ▶️ John this bug. So everyone who’s telling me they’re never going to fix it, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John But the word on the street is that they are going to fix this bug in some future version of the Mac operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which one will it be? We’ll find out. But I am excited about that. And of course, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John way for me to know that by looking at the various feedbacks I’ve filed because they have no responses.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But- Of course not, why would they?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so fingers crossed. I’m always worried. I’m very worried about, by the way, when there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John response on the feedbacks, not because I’m worried that they’re not fixing it, but because I’m worried that like, let’s say they are fixing this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love to be able to, you know, I mean, be in communication with the people who are fixing it to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re really fixing it. I don’t wanna like wait for it to come out in a macOS update and then I try it and it’s not fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could tell you whether it’s fixed right now. Let me help you. That’s what communication between the
⏹️ ▶️ John bug reporter and the people who are fixing it is an important efficiency. If the people who are fixing it just
⏹️ ▶️ John never communicate and then release a fix and then have their fingers crossed, like, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John hope we fixed it. Like, I can tell you if you fixed it. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I would like to point out that David Schaub in the chat says, it’ll be fixed in the first Arm Only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ROAS release, which would be so mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but so hilarious. That would be amazing. Please, Apple, please do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Do it for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s going to be before that. We were just talking about, I was just on a, spoilers for an upcoming episode of another podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m going to be on. But we were just talking about like, we had our discussion like many, many
⏹️ ▶️ John shows or maybe more also years ago about when do we think they’ll stop supporting Intel with Mac OS. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we based on the math of when they stopped supporting PowerPC and 68K, we came
⏹️ ▶️ John up with a number that was reasonable. Or of course, I’ve forgotten what it was. I think it was maybe 2026. Do you guys remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t remember. But yeah, I’m guessing it’s within the next couple of years, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. So that time is coming, but hopefully far after this bug is fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of this bug, lots of people were having fun trying to reproduce it, inspired by Casey’s brave
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey after show on the last show, where
⏹️ ▶️ John he opened many, many windows while recording a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, actually, speaking of, I think I asked you in Slack. I don’t think you ever replied, but I’ll ask you here. Did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you end up needing to use the hardware recorder’s audio file, or was the audio hijack file fine?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your audio file was fine. It did not interrupt the audio, thank goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ John computer can handle some empty text out of Windows, it’s okay. But lots of people tried reproducing it because they wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like Casey, because who doesn’t? And they would open lots of windows and they’d send me screenshots or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, and I just got tired of replying to them all by asking a simple question,
⏹️ ▶️ John did you have more than one user logged in? Because it’s so much harder to reproduce with a single user logged
⏹️ ▶️ John in. You can do it, but you’re going to be opening a lot of windows, right? So if you don’t want to open
⏹️ ▶️ John a bazillion windows, log in a second user. And of course, then people say, well, I don’t have a second user. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really easy to make a second user on Mac OS. You just go to system settings, you go boop, boop, boop, call the user tests, give
⏹️ ▶️ John it a dumb password. Boop. It’s so easy. And then when you’re done, you can delete that user and delete the home director and they’re gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very clean, very easy to do. So if you really do want to reproduce this, my public service
⏹️ ▶️ John announcement is log in as more than one user. If you’ve never done that on your Mac, that’s another fun
⏹️ ▶️ John part of this thing. But anyway, if you want to reproduce it, it takes far fewer windows that way. I had one bit of feedback from
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who could reproduce it, Smay, S-M-A-Y, I don’t think I could find a full name, on Macedon, said, I can confirm
⏹️ ▶️ John the suspicion that polling rate has an effect on the window dragging bug. Higher polling rate seems to be correlated with
⏹️ ▶️ John more shakiness. My mouse was connected via its wireless dongle for this recording, but connecting it over USB does not appear
⏹️ ▶️ John to have different results with the same polling rate. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video. This person has
⏹️ ▶️ John like one of those like control panels for their mouse where you can change the report rate. Basically
⏹️ ▶️ John how often does the mouse tell tell the computer a new position and you can change it from 1000
⏹️ ▶️ John per second which shows the worst bug behavior down to 125 per second which shows the best behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ John Smeg continues further testing shows that each step down in polling rate means more windows are needed to reproduce.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be be interested to see someone test with an even higher polling rate to see how few windows are needed. And we have a second video
⏹️ ▶️ John where the technique has been refined. So this is a confirmed that a polling
⏹️ ▶️ John rate is absolutely a factor and you can just crank it up and down and watch it go. And a thousand,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, reports per second for the mouse. Apparently that’s not as high as fancy gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John mice go, but that would explain a lot of the variability in pointing devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, and this is like wired versus not wired. The first video was not wired but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have one of those mice that does high polling rates it doesn’t really matter whether
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s wired or not it’s just that you know because you can do high polling right over RF just as easily as you can do it over wired.
Why schools love Chromebooks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. We got a handful of feedback with regard to Chromebooks, and I think John Weston had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best summary. John writes, regarding the Chromebook education segment in episode 555, you’re all absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct about the fact that Apple has no solution for the suite of things teachers and students would want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do on these things. In particular, the entire Google ecosystem around sharing files, handing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assignments back and forth in team or shared drives for staff and clubs. But forget about that for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do the students log in. I’ve taught in a middle school Mac lab for the last 17 years. It started with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Emacs. And just last year, we finally saved up enough cash to replace the 2007 era iMacs in it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with M1 iMacs. With that came the school district’s insistence that we switch to using their Active Directory accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for logins. And let me tell you, it’s been an absolute nightmare. Logging into a Mac with a quote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unquote roaming student profile that properly syncs A, your regular old documents, but also B,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your tilde library stuff in a way that doesn’t absolutely poop the bed under modern Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not trivial. Our current login stack of shell scripts that manually symlink things, replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sidebar elements, push things into docks, manually sync certain things that can’t sit quote-unquote live in networked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey locations like GarageBand projects, Minecraft worlds, etc. is a total hellscape. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the IT staff has ever used a Mac before. They’re all just googling and using bloody chat GPT to try to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these issues, while I flail away on the teaching end trying to commiserate with students when their work disappears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entirely every couple of days. Anyway, my thought on an Apple Chromebook competitor is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deploying and servicing a giant fleet of these things is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, way easier on them in the Chromebook ecosystem for what they actually are doing with these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even setting aside the price, which itself is also very powerful, but for a lot of, even districts that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the funding where maybe they could get a little bit higher price, they would probably still stick with Chromebooks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the management side is so good for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, from this story I can see, because I’ve had Macs that have had to be on Active Directory and everything, that
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that the people don’t know what they’re doing with Macs is just making this worse. When I had
⏹️ ▶️ John Active Directory on my Mac at work, because it was a requirement for all the Macs at the company, I think the first implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John that my work did used the Active Directory support that was part of Mac OS at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming it’s still there. And that is terrible, because everything is slow and blocking and nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John works. And then eventually they moved to one of the third-party solutions that basically has some third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John software running on your Mac that runs and keeps your stuff in sync with Active
⏹️ ▶️ John Directory but doesn’t actually use the operating systems like built-in Active Directory stuff. So you can log
⏹️ ▶️ John into your Mac even if Active Directory is hosed in some way. But, and like, if you change the password on your Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John this little background thing will sync it with Active Directory. And if you change your password in Active Directory, this little thing will
⏹️ ▶️ John sync your password on your Mac with it. And it’s basically like sort of an asynchronous way of doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it rather than synchronous because the synchronous way means that nothing ever works and everyone hates it. And then you need on top
⏹️ ▶️ John of that fancier software that you can do stuff like manage what’s in people’s docs and restrict
⏹️ ▶️ John their access to system settings and stuff like that. That’s all stuff that’s available through third-party software,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it takes expertise and money and those are two things schools tend not to have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Steve Leggett writes, I worked in Vermont schools for over a decade in IT support and saw schools
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try Windows Netbooks, thin clients, Apple devices, Macs and iPads, Linux, et cetera, before Chromebooks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came out. Chromebooks were the one system that provided simple account and device management, as well as free or inexpensive online
⏹️ ▶️ Casey administrator training and certification. School teachers and librarians administer Chromebooks in many schools. They are a community
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that shares their knowledge. This is quite different from the worlds of arcane knowledge required for Apple and Windows administration. Another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey factor in Chromebook success is the fact that the device can be easily used by many people. This is going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to what John Weston was saying. For example, if a Chromebook breaks, any other Chromebook can replace it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without loss of a user’s files and preferences. It just works. Apple could create a less expensive Mac or iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but can they duplicate the other factors that contribute to Chromebook success? I
⏹️ ▶️ John remember when Chromebooks first came out, I think we talked about it on the show, Google put out like a comic
⏹️ ▶️ John book style sort of introductory series of graphics to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John what the deal is with Chromebooks. And I think this is probably where I got obsessed with the idea of you throwing your
⏹️ ▶️ John electronic device into a lake or whatever. I think that was their example, that like if you have a Chromebook and it gets
⏹️ ▶️ John dropped into the ocean or over the side of the boat or into a lake, don’t worry. none of your stuff was
⏹️ ▶️ John really on there anyway. It’s just a fancy terminal front end for, you know, a web browser
⏹️ ▶️ John for a front end for everything. It’s in your Google Drive and your Gmail and all that other stuff. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John promise, like Apple is slowly creeping up on that promise with their client side approach with phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jason Snell talked about this a lot this week as he deleted his user account and recreated it in a slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John ill-advised troubleshooting thing. We’ll try to put a link in the show notes to that. He’s already written about it on Macworld, but he also talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John it on Upgrade. With an iPhone, in theory, if everything is iCloud backed
⏹️ ▶️ John up and everything, if your phone falls in the ocean and you get a new phone, you can restore from your most
⏹️ ▶️ John recent iCloud backup, which should be fairly recent, you hope, like maybe the night before while it was plugged in while it was
⏹️ ▶️ John charging, and you’ll get pretty much all your stuff back. All your settings, you won’t have to spend an hour setting
⏹️ ▶️ John everything up. Maybe you have to log into one or two things, but it’s getting close. It’s not as close as
⏹️ ▶️ John the Chrome thing where like, don’t worry, nothing was ever on there anyway. The cloud is the source of truth. this is really
⏹️ ▶️ John a fancy web browser terminal, right? Apple’s devices are not like that, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to provide that same experience on the iPhone, on the Mac, forget it. If your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop falls into the ocean, you better hope you have a legit recent backup
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere that you can restore from, like a time machine backup, or, you know, even an online
⏹️ ▶️ John backup is probably not gonna be as rich as a time machine backup. And how many people do that? I know we talk about it all the time in this
⏹️ ▶️ John show, but Macs don’t come with a second hard drive built in that automatically does time machine too. That’s something that people
⏹️ ▶️ John have to choose to do. It’s easy once you get connect drive, it’ll say, do you want me to use your time machine? You say yes, and you’re off to the races.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it’s a laptop, how often do you connect it? People don’t like mounting and unmounting drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the Mac or anything like that is far from this. And on the iPad, of course, the problem is it’s a single user thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s no sort of multi-user solution. So even though you could use the iPad as sort of a
⏹️ ▶️ John glorified web browser for web apps or whatever, A, that’s not taking advantage of the iPad, And B,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s still no multi-user solution. So yeah, Chromebooks have won in education,
⏹️ ▶️ John not because, oh, they just undercut Apple, but really Apple stuff is better. They won in education
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re better. They’re a better solution for education than anything Apple has done. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t just because they’re dirt cheap. That helps a lot. And in many cases, it’s the only option because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how cheap they are, because school budgets are very tight in most places. But it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only because they are cheap, that they have also developed a huge amount of value for the schools and the way that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run, the way they are managed, et cetera, that what they run and what they don’t run and what they don’t need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For Apple to actually meaningfully address that market would require them to do way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than just make cheaper MacBook Airs. Like that isn’t enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing, like I said, the only thing that they have that’s getting close to that and it’s not particularly close
⏹️ ▶️ John is the iPhone because the iPad, you know, well, I guess you can never store the iPad the same way, The iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and the iPad, they work so hard because, mostly just because of the iPhone, because that’s their top product.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve improved the process of, as Jason puts it, getting a new iPhone and making it yours. At least
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s possible. There’s nothing like that on the Mac. Not even possible. Nevermind that it takes hours to do it on the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. On the Mac, there’s just nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, what about Migration Assistant and everything?
⏹️ ▶️ John Assistant does not copy all the things all the time. It’s pretty good. And, yeah, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John good, but it’s not the same. It’s not the same as like, you know, The problem with migration is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John is that if you did drop your Mac laptop in the ocean, what are you going to migration assistant from? Like it’s in the ocean. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s using my time machine backup again. Nobody has time machine backups unless I listen to this podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John no basically there’s no iCloud backup for Macs. That’s what it comes down to. And there was iCloud backup for phones for ages before
⏹️ ▶️ John it was good with the restore. But there’s plain is no iCloud backup for Macs, which I don’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ John understand because as the Mac, you know, Mac is on Apple Silicon and like, I know you can’t reuse all that software
⏹️ ▶️ John and time machines great and all. but like iCloud backup for Mac is starting to get on my list of
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of overdue things Because then yeah when you drop your laptop in the ocean, then you can do an
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly long and tedious Restore from your last iCloud backup of your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John would be great and they could still more storage, right? I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear more about what’s on that list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah Well, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John but with the Chromebook you don’t sit there and do an hours long restore You just get a new Chromebook and you sign into your Google account
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s two seconds You know, I mean like I really just want to emphasize it there Even though functionally
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing the same things the amount of time it takes to restore your phone in the best-case scenario scenario is
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing compared to sign into your Google account on this okay you ready to go again.
John’s enhancement request
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving along, apparently everything is coming up Milhouse, I mean Syracuse. Joachim Fornellas,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fornayas, I’m sorry, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John American. I tried to put a guess pronunciation by Googling searching, I think it’s Joachim.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, we’ll go with that. In Mac OS 14.1 beta, the photos app will remember whether original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or freeform was last chosen as crop aspect ratio and will pre-select that setting for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uncropped photos. You’re welcome everyone, it’s thanks to us that this has happened, clearly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is from several shows ago when I was complaining that I had clicked the original aspect ratio 16,000 some
⏹️ ▶️ John odd times because it never remembered that that’s what I want as my default for all
⏹️ ▶️ John photos when cropping them in the Apple Photos app on the Mac. And
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly in macOS 14.1, they have solved this problem
⏹️ ▶️ John in the way I was saying, like the most straightforward way, the simplest way, is like, look, just remember what I clicked last time.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not the best solution. I’ll take it, to be clear. I will absolutely take it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it does mean that if I decide to crop something to a square, the next time I go to crop a photo, it will be on square.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you wanted to do the better solution to this, it would be, it’s more difficult. You’d have to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep track for every single photo in your library. Has the user
⏹️ ▶️ John ever selected an aspect ratio? Yes, no. And then you have to say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John what should the default be if on a photo they have never selected an aspect ratio?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s different than just saying, whatever they pick last time, I’ll use that on the next one because say I crop something to square.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the fancier system, when I go to the next photo, it would say, has any aspect ratio ever been selected
⏹️ ▶️ John for this photo? Yes, no. And if the answer is no, what do they want the default to be? Original. Okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be original. So that would be a fancier solution. But once you’re storing a new piece of data
⏹️ ▶️ John for every photo, that is a heavyweight solution. That’s not something you can sneak out in, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, Mac OS 14.1. That’s like a year long investment because I have 170,000
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, you wanna store even just a Boolean for 170,000 photos?
⏹️ ▶️ John And how do you seed that Boolean and where do you put the storage for it? And how do you sync it? And it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it adds up real fast how many photos you think Apple deals with. So I understand why they did the solution and I thank them for it. And I’m excited to live
⏹️ ▶️ John in a world where I don’t have to deal with this issue anymore.
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Off-centered holes (for off-centered people)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have gotten word from the streets that off-centered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holes for lightning or USB-C or what have you, not new. So Paul
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, I just had a look at my girlfriend’s iPhone 13 mini with an Apple leather case. The cutout for the lightning port is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also far from perfectly centered. How did we never notice this before?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, like I said, I think it’s just because, you know, how often do you look at a man’s shoes, right? Like we weren’t looking at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John of the phone until the USB-C cables wouldn’t correctly, you know, seat
⏹️ ▶️ John because they weren’t fitting through the hole. And then all of a sudden we came very interested in, why doesn’t it fit? Why doesn’t it go all the way in? Is it because
⏹️ ▶️ John the hole’s off center? And like I said, the answer in my case was no, even if the hole was centered, it still wouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John fit, but that’s why we’re all suddenly looking at the bottom of the phone. So this is an iPhone 13 mini, so it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not like recent history. It’s just apparently very hard to get that hole centered.
Alcantara cases and podcast logos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, this is a word that for the longest time I pronounced incorrectly in my head. I always pronounced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it Alicantra, which is not even close to correct, but Alcantara,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey close to that anyway. They’re Alcantara iPhone cases. Tell me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just put this in here because it’s a fun, I hadn’t seen iPhone cases made of Alcantara.
⏹️ ▶️ John Alcantara is a material that’s been used in the interiors of cars for many years as a sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of synthetic suede type material. I’m I’m not sure why it got popular. I think the part of it is
⏹️ ▶️ John fashion part of it is like it’s grippier than leather So lots of racy cars they would put it on the seats
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep your butt from sliding around Because leather is slipperier They put it on steering wheels because it feels
⏹️ ▶️ John soft and it’s nice and grippy and unlike leather It doesn’t sort of get shiny as you use it and gets more slippery
⏹️ ▶️ John Making an iPhone case out of it is interesting. I think it would have way too much pocket friction, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I do confess I’ve never tried it on an iPhone case so we’ll see and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s also related to a recent change we made on the the podcast artwork
⏹️ ▶️ John The regular ATP artwork that you’ve seen is just a black background with the ATP logo on it but if you are a member
⏹️ ▶️ John you get the the Edited members feed like not the bootleg but the the edited members
⏹️ ▶️ John feed that just has no ads in it the artwork for that It looks very much like the
⏹️ ▶️ John regular public show artwork, but instead of a black background and it’s got kind of like a dark gray and that’s supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to look like Alcantara because you know, we talk about cars a lot and Alcantara is a kind of a car thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But a lot of our members complained that they would subscribe to the public feed and the member one and it was difficult for them to tell which one was
⏹️ ▶️ John the member one because it’s just like a, instead of it being pure black, it’s like kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fuzzy gray and it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell. Yeah, it’s hard to tell. So I was messing around with the artwork because we recently
⏹️ ▶️ John introduced feed that just has the specials in it. We needed a new artwork for that. And I put like colored stitching
⏹️ ▶️ John around the border because again, in car interiors, they very often have Alcantara with, you know, Porsche will charge
⏹️ ▶️ John you $800 if you want the accented contrasting stitching for your seats. This is a thing that happens in cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t ask. Anyway, I put contrasting colored stitching around the specials only feed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, we liked it so much, we said we should do that for the members feed too. So now the members feed has yellow stitching
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s Alcantara background. And the specials feed has blue stitching and it’s Alcantara background. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John know at the tiny thumbnail size that you see this thing, It’s almost impossible to
⏹️ ▶️ John even detect this. In fact, we kept cranking up the size of the stitching so you could even see it at thumbnail size.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you zoom the artwork in a lot, you will see it more clearly. My artwork
⏹️ ▶️ John on this is not great, I admit. But just for people who wanna know, what the heck is that supposed to be? It’s supposed to be Alcantara
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I have some relevant information here. If only one of us had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Alcantara phone case right here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you get it because it was in the notes or are you just buying every iPhone case?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually, by coincidence, had ordered it about a week earlier. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been familiar with this Alma brand because I also have one of their Alcantara watch straps. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can say your suspicion of it having way too much pocket friction is exactly right. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say that the level of pocket in and out friction that it has is similar to silicone for totally different reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, it is like all textured fabric and it feels fantastic. fantastic like the the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you’re if you’re gonna like you know pet your phone on the desk or something this material feels awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the color of course I got the orange one the colors are good they actually come in very nice colors not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of these like you know boring safe grays and browns like everyone else so this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wonderful object for like looks and feel it is not a very well-made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case the buttons are like a little bit crooked and a little misaligned and they don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that good. The camera lip around the camera plateau has like a sharp edge like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your finger catches the edge it’s sharp and that’s no good. And overall the case is pretty bulky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fairly thick. You know honestly when you compare it to the fine woven, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine woven is still my favorite case that that I have so far. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate to say it. I mean the Alcantara one, the Alma one, it does have an action button but it’s misaligned and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s hard to press and doesn’t feel good. Lovely. You know, it is mag safe. It doesn’t have any branding on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back. So like, I like a lot of it. It does have, you know, it has the bottom. So John would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate it. You know, it’s a fine case, but for this purpose, I can’t really recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this material. It is just too much friction. And I think if you’re gonna have that much friction you’re getting out of the pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might as well have the silicone case, which I think works a little bit better. But it is really cool. And it feels,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels and looks fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I do see the crooked action button in their own product photography. Yeah,
Thin cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also have some case-related follow-up. I am still casting around for a case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I do more than just like that I that I really like but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’ve landed on for now is a case that was very highly recommended by a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people I’m asked on the Taurus because apparently it’s all caps TORRAS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Magnetic slim fit designed for iPhone 15 blah blah blah blah blah anyways this thing was like 18 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is obscenely cheap compared to the $60 Apple leather cases. I’ve been buying for most of my life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is a Plasticky case it is a little bit slippery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my taste and critically The lip is quite tall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John this would never in a million years work for you because apparently you are in you are incapable of hitting the swipe up Gesture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unless there’s nothing in the way This is like a full-on cliff in the way, which it took me a day to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to and it’s now fine The case is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very cheap, which appeals to me. The magnet within the case is really, really strong. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my new best friend, the pop socket is like freaking welded onto this thing, which is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice, but the case is fine. I would give it four stars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in no small part because it’s so darn cheap. The button feel is good. In fact, the buttons might be the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of this. That is really crisp button feel, which I really, really like, But I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wish that the Peel case, P-E-E-L, I really wish they had buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instead of a cutout, particularly for the action button, which when I had briefly had one, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a cutout. If Peel ever comes out with one that has actual buttons, please somebody let me know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I can buy that one because I loved the feel of that. I absolutely loved the feel of that in hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just I couldn’t stand those buttons for more than 15 seconds. Literally it was 15 seconds it was on my phone before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I took it back off and then returned it. But anyways, we’ll put a link in the show notes. This is not a spectacular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case, four stars out of five. And I think I’m grading on a curve because it’s so darn cheap, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is the best one I’ve found so far. So you might want to try that out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying, I want to see the size of the bottom lip. It doesn’t look any bigger than normal. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have they Photoshopped the product photography to make the phone itself look thinner?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yes, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they have. Yeah, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John rendered. Yeah, yeah. It’s not a real photo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The pictures are not great. And I am in a dark room, so I don’t think I, well, now I only have one camera with me. Well, no, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have my continuity camera. Anyways, suffice to say, I’m not gonna be able to take a good picture of it now, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too tall. Like it’s not too tall to the point that I can’t use it because obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m using it, but I really wish it was a little bit slimmer. Just there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much space between the top of the screen and the top of the case. I’m probably overblowing it in my verbal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey description here, but it’s more than the leather case by a noticeable margin. and I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that. All right, moving on. Speaking of things that I don’t care for, but apparently
Thermoelectric phone fans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adam wrote in, not, well I don’t think it was Adam Arment, but you never know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in with regard to those absolutely bananas Razer phone coolers, this was the LED thing, I think we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mentioned an episode before last, that I think operate via, well I shouldn’t say via MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco They attack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey MagSafe. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, there we go, by way of MagSafe. And anyways, Adam writes, most of my friends play on smartphones, so I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too. And when I want to play with them. Keep in mind that a smartphone is the only gaming device for many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people, especially outside the US. When I play multiplayer shooters like PUBG Call of Duty for longer periods of time, my iPhone 13
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro overheats. The screen dims, my frames per second drop. It’s not terrible, but it’s uncomfortable. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little thingy from Razer works like magic. It’s not only a fan, it gets literally ice cold when it’s on. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know how it works, but it’s shocking how effective it is. Since buying it, I haven’t had a single performance issue, even in the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey demanding games during long, sometimes two-plus-hour sessions. Also, you can turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the RGBs off in the app, which is good to know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way it works, the way it gets ice cold on the back is that it actually has a thermoelectric plate, also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called a Peltier plate, or Peltier, I don’t know how people pronounce that. Overclockers use these things sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like amp up their overclocking abilities. It’s basically a solid state device that transfers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat from one side to the other. So like it burns a ton of power, but what it creates is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very cold side and a very hot side. And so you can make fans and heat sinks work a little bit better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the expense of massive amounts of power if you put the cold side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the thing you’re cooling and put the hot side against the fan or heat sink, and then the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan has to cool both the heat from the thing that you are cooling plus the heat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generated by the Peltier plate. So it ends up being comically inefficient.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in order to chill the CPU a little bit more, you have to use a lot more power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then dissipate a lot more heat on the other side. But it does work. the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh you can buy like little mini fridges and stuff that occasionally work this way like really really like you know desktop size like you know fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one can uh kind of mini fridges that have those things but they’re they’re they’re so weak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and inefficient you don’t you don’t see them used for very much else but that it does have one of those dimensions in the in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amazon description so that’s how that works and i gotta say like if i had a need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this which i see why some people do like if you’re like really you know as as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this person writes in like if you’re like a really hardcore phone gamer, this could be relevant. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, this looks like a fairly decent product for those needs, as long as you don’t care about, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, heat, noise or dignity.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not going to help your battery life, right? Doesn’t the thing get powered by the phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It can be ever since it has USB-C input, so you could power it from the phone. I wouldn’t power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it from the phone. I think it would drain it pretty fast. Indeed.
Tire-pressure monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we need a clever name for this and I don’t have one, but as part of the, we have listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in every walk of life corner, Mattias Mattias Lindblad writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have extensive experience in developing indirect tire pressure management systems or ITPMS. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, I think this was brought up because you were talking about the Rivian and decreasing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the air in the tires memory serves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was basically saying like the Land Rover had whatever kind of tire pressure sensor was in the Land Rover,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it updated live. So that if I was stopped and putting air in the tires or taking air out of the tires on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dash, it would show me like the the current inflation level of the tires, like the current tire pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of each tire. Whereas the Rivian, I had said during that episode, I had said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that when I aired down the Rivian, it didn’t show me live. I had to drive a little while before it updated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it turns out, so I actually, I changed the tire pressure one time since then. And when I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it the second time, it did update live, but only in one tire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t know what capability it has. Software, baby! Yeah, I don’t know. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, if somebody can write it, maybe, maybe Matthias Lindblad here, if somebody can write it and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, what do I have here? What kind of system is it that doesn’t update in real time most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, but once one wheel did? Because it seems like the indirect tire pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco measurement systems by the people who’ve written in it sounds like they wouldn’t work this way. So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that just sounds like bugs. But I think Mattias wrote in because I had mentioned that my car also
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t show the pressures but it also doesn’t, you have to like drive for a little bit for it to do anything. So anyway, this explanation
⏹️ ▶️ John I think shed some light on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ITPMS is an amazing piece of software using sensor fusion and advanced signal processing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to determine when the pressure has dropped significantly compared to the reference level. The main input are the signals from the rotation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sensors of the ABS system, that’s any luck brakes, but rotational speeds are not enough. If you would, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have lost the pressure in all four wheels at the same time, this would just be interpreted as the vehicle going at a different speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could in theory compare to the GPS speed, but that’s not reliable enough. So instead, you have to look at the changes in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey signal spectrum caused by the change properties of the under-inflated tire. The fact that you need to look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the signal input during driving means that it will take a short while before you can get a warning. It is, however, not the explanation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for delay in showing the absolute pressure, as this is not something a TITPMS system can measure. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can get a reading of the pressure, you don’t have an indirect system. Direct pressure monitoring systems,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or DTPMS, which use battery-powered sensors in each tire can provide immediate readings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, this comes at the cost of higher battery consumption. To optimize battery life, many DTPMS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey systems only transmit data when they detect driving activity, which is especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey important since these batteries are non-replaceable.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe they’re sending, maybe the ones in your tires are sending them on different intervals and they’re out of sync with each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe batteries are dead. Maybe it’s just a software bug, but it is a good clarification that the, you know, the cheapo system
⏹️ ▶️ John like I have in my car that just uses the wheel speed sensors that they already have to put on the car for ABS,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not my, it’s not like they’re cheaping out by not showing pressure. They just don’t know, like the car doesn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John the pressure because it’s not a pressure sensor. It’s just basically saying, hey, is the pressure different than it’s supposed to be?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know what it was before, and that’s why there’s like a calibration, you know, when you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you get the tire light on my dashboard that comes on because the tire is low, and you inflate everything to the right thing, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to manually reset the system to say, now, whatever the tires are at now, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John how they should be, which is why you should always do all four tires, and not just, you know, one that you think is low. But direct tire
⏹️ ▶️ John pressure monitoring, yeah, that’s a whole different can of worms, and I’m not quite
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sure why his
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t showing the numbers.
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80%-charge-limit setting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some topics.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to very, very briefly mention that I have been dabbling with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new, I think it’s just for the new phones, but certainly new in iOS 17, the setting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your battery settings for topping out at 80%, kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re in an electric car. My thought process here was, well, I’ve got the big boy phone now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s got the big boy battery, so why not take some empathy or have some empathy for the machine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, and top the battery out at 80%? And I’ve done this on and off for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last week or so, and I don’t think I dig it. And I think that I don’t like it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it stresses me out, which is probably a Casey problem. I am not saying that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not something that you, the listener, should try. I’m just saying I didn’t care for it. I am also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the opinion that showing your battery percentage in your status bar is barbaric because all that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does is add stress in your life. And turns out when I’m not topping out, when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not at my maximum available battery charge, when I take the phone off the charger in the morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I basically am just stressing myself out all day long. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think it is a very good idea. And certainly if I wasn’t a complete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dork that if I didn’t upgrade my phone every year in the very wasteful way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I do, I would be more apt to try to run this. Like John, perhaps you would consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this particularly for future phones. But since I upgrade every year and since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just stresses me the crap out, I’ve decided that I’m probably not gonna stick with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I do think, I applaud the feature’s existence and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely think that I could live with it. It’s just, I would constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be looking at my battery wondering, uh-oh, what happens if I need to leave the house and I need a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bunch of charge and I didn’t expect it. And oh my God, what am I gonna do? I mean, I have that battery pack, but it’s all the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upstairs. And I’m just like, I was wrapping myself around the axle completely unnecessarily, which is why I think it’s a Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. But I do think that on an average day, the 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro Max could get me through the day from 80%. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would probably hit, you know, 20 to 30% by the end of the day on an average day’s use. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seemed to be what I was getting, but it just stressed me out too much. And so in the same way that I’ve always had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery percentage off, like you should, I turned this off after a few days because it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just too much. It was too much for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, as battery technology advances, there’ll be a nice software solution to this, which is basically just to show 100% when it’s at 80%. That’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ John point. The big expensive batteries in electric
⏹️ ▶️ John vehicles pretty much all try very hard to not
⏹️ ▶️ John get you to charge it 100%. I’m not sure if any of them outright lie to you. Some of them put
⏹️ ▶️ John huge amount of the batteries in reserve. Like, because again, these batteries are the most expensive component
⏹️ ▶️ John in the cars. And by default, you know, in many cars, you can’t charge them more than 80%,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you do the, are you super duper serious and you’re going on a road trip? Then you can go to all the way to a hundred, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they come basically out of the box like this option in the iPhone that says, just never charge over 80% because you’ve got plenty of
⏹️ ▶️ John range for the 80% and because it lengthens the life of your battery. Draining your battery to zero or charging it to 100 or
⏹️ ▶️ John all things your battery does not like, wants to be somewhere in the middle. So if you never go to 100, it will lengthen
⏹️ ▶️ John the life of your battery. If you’re planning on handing down your phones to like your kids or younger siblings
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, turning this option on will make it so that when they get the phone, when you’re done with it, the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John will be less fried. But of course it means you have to have a phone that’s at 80%. And for a regular size
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, I think 80% may not be enough to get through the day. With the big one, it might be, as you noted Casey, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s stressing you out because it’s showing 80%. But Apple, we’re not at the point for battery technology where Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can do the software change that says, yeah, just show 80% as 100% and show 100% as like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, change the color of the status indicator or something goes super duper topped off or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Battery pro max. We’re not there yet on the regular size iPhone. On the Max, maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John could get away with it. But first of all, if they did this, you know it would be another gate.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be battery gate. Like Apple’s lying to you. They say your battery’s 100%, but it’s really at 80. Nevermind the EVs do this all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time. They would be sued instantly. Right, but if there was third-party control
⏹️ ▶️ John would immediately make a little system level utility that says show 80% is 100% in case we’d use it. And so he wouldn’t be stressed out. but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no third party system level utilities like that for the iPhone. So we just have to wait for Apple to get around
⏹️ ▶️ John to it. And if you could snap your fingers and say, hey, Apple, for the same size and weight, you could double the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John capacity, then they could roll out this feature. And they could make it an optional and they’ll have a little switch that says show 80% is 100%.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in case we turn it on and he would be fine, but we don’t have that magic battery yet. So we’ll just keep
AirPods Pro as concert earplugs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In keeping with the theme of like grab bag topics, Marco, can you tell me about the seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible decision you made based on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what’s been put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes? What we have in the show notes here in the private show notes is AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro 2 as concert earplugs, which seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are just begging for all the feedback. But why don’t you explain yourself and then we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can all laugh at your terrible decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, let us know if they’re the AirPods Pro 2.1 or the AirPods Pro 2.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John were the 2.0 because this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about a month ago or something like that, a month and a half ago. So earlier in this summer or fall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I attended, of course, a Phish concert. You know, I don’t go to that. I go to like one concert a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m not like a concert power user here. So keep that in mind. But because I care about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my hearing and I kind of need it for things, I typically wear some kind of concert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earplug. Set aside the ridiculousness of I’m paying good money to go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear music that I then have to plug my ears up so I don’t hear it too much. I know this is ridiculous,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this is how concerts are. So I would love for them to just turn it down a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but unfortunately, you know, they don’t, they don’t, you know, they don’t mix concerts just for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my tastes, but anyway, um, so there is, this is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very common request, a common need for people to, people who go to concerts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot or a little and who don’t want to, you know, blow their ears out so much that they cause hearing damage over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time or that their ears are ringing for, you know, the whole rest of the night or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s this whole category of concert earplugs or musician earplugs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those actually are two slightly different things but for the most part it’s, you know, it’s earplugs that are made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically to reduce the amount of volume that you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but to try to do it in a way that doesn’t make everything sound like crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That doesn’t like muffle everything and make it sound like you’re listening through a pillow or anything. So the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is reduce the level but make sure that you’re doing your best to let the frequencies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through evenly and that’s difficult. You know if you just stick your fingers in your ears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’ll notice is that the frequencies are not muffled uniformly. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lose a lot more of the high frequencies, like the treble, the crispiness, that sound. You lose a lot more of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you keep a lot of the bass, the low frequencies. And that’s just because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various physics properties of plugging your ears, and sound waves. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can get earplugs that cost like 10 cents in a bulk pack that construction workers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use and stuff, you know, just like those little foam plug things. You can get those, ember those to a concert,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they will work just fine, but it won’t sound very good. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will kind of feel like you’re wasting your money a lot more in that scenario to see this concert, because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna miss a lot more of the music and it won’t sound very good. Anyway, so there’s this whole category of concert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earplugs. I did all the research a couple years ago when I started going to concerts again. Like, I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the research and bought a few and tried a few. The funny thing is it’s actually kind of fun to try, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way I would try them would be to put them in and then put full-size headphones on and just crank the music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up really loud and see like, how do they sound? How do they work? So anyway, I was able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to test a few different ones. So for quick reference, before everyone writes in and tells me I didn’t test their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco favorite one, the ones I tested were Eargasm, the Edemonic ER20, Earpeace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vibes, Mumba, and the Soundbrenner Minuendo. They all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suck. The ones I spent the most time with were the Soundbrenner Minuendo. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were the least sucky among the group in my opinion. But they all suck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They all promise that, oh, it’s a flatter frequency response, you’ll hear the music really well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It still sounds like garbage. It kinda sucks, because you wanna enjoy the concert, again, you wanna enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the music, and these concert earplugs, while they are better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the cheap little foam plugs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that much better. And I think it’s doing a disservice to people not having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better options because ideally more people should be using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of hearing protection at concerts. But if it’s gonna ruin the way it sounds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people won’t do it. So ideally, we need a better solution. Now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was curious, does active noise cancellation in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ANC headphones like the AirPods Pro, does that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protect your hearing? Now, I am not a doctor. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this physically does the same thing. Does noise cancellation actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco provide the same physical protection as earplugs?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know the answer. But I decided to try it for this concert.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for this concert I brought with me my Sennbrenner Minuendo because I wanted a point of comparison and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew that if the AirPods Pro didn’t work out, I would switch back to those. I spent like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a quarter of the concert with the Soundbrenners, and then the other three quarters I did the AirPods Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should clarify that this was all, because it was about a month and a half ago, this was all done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iOS 16, and the iOS 16 version of AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco firmware. So the AirPods firmware has actually changed decently much in the iOS 17. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was trying to get the beta to install on them, but it would not do it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way you install an AirPods Pro firmware beta, you enable the beta profile with these few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco steps and then just wait and just hope it does it sometime. It’s like face recognition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, they even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you like, this might take like 24 to 48 hours. And I didn’t think to do this until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day before the concert. Left everything on, on wifi, powered, open and close the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few times, put the AirPods in, took them out for a while, like tried everything to like mix it up and kind of kicked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and it never installed it until like, you know, three days later. So I wasn’t able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try the new features and how they worked with things like adaptive audio. Like, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t able to try any of that stuff. But anyway, with the previous iOS 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era firmware, here are the results of how this went. You know, there’s different modes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of AirPods Pro. There’s the off mode where they’re basically just earplugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the off mode works, But because, again, it’s not doing any processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s just, they’re just at that point, dumb plugs in your ears, it muffled the treble and the high frequencies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much, just like any other dumb ear plugs would. So I can report that you can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use air, if they fit your ears well, you can use them for some level of hearing protection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not a ton of hearing protection. I wouldn’t do this every day. I wouldn’t do this in like an industrial setting or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a construction site or anything. But if you’re going to a concert and you have nothing else and you want to protect your hearing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just put AirPods in your ears and that will do some level of that. That’s enough for like occasional concert going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also tried the full noise canceling mode and this actually worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too well. It was way too quiet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other problem with noise canceling mode is that it’s very non-uniform in what it suppresses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, at a concert you have, especially at a Fisk concert, there’s a lot going on. There’s a lot, a lot is going on in that sound.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of different frequencies and instruments and quiet parts, loud parts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaps, big parts. Maybe the AirPods Pro got a contact high from all the people around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, who knows? So there’s a lot going on there. So the noise cancelling mode I found was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really suitable for it. What was interesting, I thought, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just put on transparency mode, will it blow my ears out the way the concert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does? And it turns out the answer is, yes it will. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transparency mode would have some kind of limit on how loud it would go. I could not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find that limit. And in all fairness, the transparency mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I would test, I would have it on, and then I would take them out and listen without anything in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my ears, and it was pretty much indistinguishable. So the transparency mode did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accurately transmit the audio from the concert transparently to my ears,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was actually pretty impressive considering how loud it was, but it wasn’t really solving my problem because it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still way too loud because it was basically the exact volume of the concert.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, if you think about it, when you use them just as dumb earplugs, the amount of
⏹️ ▶️ John sound that they allow through when you’re using them as dumb earplugs is still going through when you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John them in transparency and then added to it is what the speaker inside the earphones is outputting.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it doesn’t surprise me that it was the same volume. It would be better if maybe like, when you did like concert
⏹️ ▶️ John transparency, that it only played like the highs. Like if it knew what kind of sound would be passively
⏹️ ▶️ John muffled by the plastic, you know what I mean? Or the rubber or whatever your thing is, but that’s difficult because you can buy different tips
⏹️ ▶️ John for those things. And so it may not know exactly what’s being muffled, but if they always know it’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ John highs. But anyway, transparency mode is setting through everything. So you’ve got like, for transparency mode to be volume
⏹️ ▶️ John limiting, when there are dumb earphones, you should hear nothing. because then the only sound you would hear would
⏹️ ▶️ John be produced by the earphones, and then you can control the volume. But I think most of the sound you’re hearing at a concert is a sound
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just blasting its way right through those ear tips into your ears, except for maybe the high frequencies. And then transparency
⏹️ ▶️ John mode is playing all the frequencies in your ear. And just to be clear on your advice of saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have nothing with you, you can use AirPods, only AirPods Pros or other AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John that go in your ear canal. If you have like me, the AirPods 3, they’re not gonna do anything for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you need the kind that has like the squishy rubber tips, basically. So, anyway, Transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode was not going to do it. Um, there’s various options under Accessibility, there’s various headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accommodations, various other things. I had a really hard time getting any of them to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good in this context. Um, what I ended up doing and doing for the majority of the concert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, um, in the AirPod settings, usually in the regular settings page, there’s an option down at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called something like Attenuate Loud Sounds. I basically would use transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode, but with that, with attenuate loud sounds turned on. That actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did a really great job overall. It was not ideal, and I’ll tell you why in a minute,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but overall, it was way better than every single concert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earplug I’ve tried by a mile. A thousand times better. In every way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was more comfortable. It sounded better. Like, it was less awkward. It fit better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything about it was better, even in just this mode, even though it was not perfect. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main problem I had with the 1080p loud sounds, first of all, is that it’s dynamic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if they would really go at it, you know, got a nice loud part of the music, it would bring it down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then if there was a quiet part, it would then amplify everything back up again. And then as soon as things got loud,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would bring it back down, like a slow compressor. It was a little distracting, but it wasn’t enough that I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoy the concert, And it was, and even with that again, still better than every concert earplug I’ve ever tried.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that was a little annoying. And also it was a little bit too smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that like transparency mode, and especially with the attenuate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loud sounds option, but even regular transparency mode, it tries to be a little bit smart about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it sends through. It’s not actually fully transparent. Like one thing I noticed recently, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope this is temporary, ever since the iOS 17 firmware updates for the AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, if I’m walking and say a car drives by, it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird for a second. Like it’s not processing it correctly. It tries to do something with like the tire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise of it rolling by. And there are like certain, certain like noise things that pass me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in real life with transparency mode are being weirdly handled by it only since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iOS 17 firmware. So I hope this is a temporary bug or they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna tweak or fix or something because it’s a little bit weird. Anyway, in the concert setting, some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those smarts would get in the way a little bit of this feature. You know, certain frequencies it would muffle a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit more than others, maybe because they were louder than them. Certain noises it would muffle more than others because maybe it sounded like white noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was trying to be smart. Ideally, give me an option, like I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love them to do this, and I’m pretty sure I know why they won’t. I think it would be a liability thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love for Apple to add something, whether it’s called this or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a concert mode for AirPods Pro. And again, they probably wouldn’t call it that because they don’t want the liability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in case people actually hurt their ears or whatever, but I would love a mode on AirPods Pro. It’s like transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode, but it just lowers everything by a certain amount of decibels. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, you know, they don’t have to call it that in the interface. They can make it nicer and, you know, not use technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terminology so people don’t need to know what these terms mean, but that’s what I want. transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode that just lowers all frequencies by a fixed amount that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow control because if they did that they would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most perfect concert earplugs they are so close now and they’re already better than the entire category
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was a little annoying that they were trying to be smart in ways that they were they were kind of being defeated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the music like sometimes it would do weird things to the vocal range like you don’t want that Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if I moved my head, like if I looked left or right, now they’re getting different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco levels because they’re not on access with the speakers each anymore. So like, you know, if I turn my head to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left, well then my right ear is closer to the speakers now, and so it would lower the right ear more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, so it would do weird things like that because it was trying to be too smart.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What they need is a dumb reduction mode like just act like earplugs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring everything down by a certain fixed amount and leave it there until the setting changes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With that change I think you could see these used in a lot more places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Battery life was great. There was no problem making it through the entire show which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was I was kind of curious if they would because a fish show is like three hours long but they did they made it through just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. Again comfort was great, didn’t notice them. What I would also like is maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a more discreet look. Maybe like a black wrap or just if they ever make them in black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some other more discreet color. You kind of stand out if you’re wearing AirPods at a concert. People see those white
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things in your ears. It’s very obvious where earplugs usually are not bright white. They’re usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black or skin colored to try to blend in. So that would be nice too. But overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are by far my favorite concert earplugs, if you can call them that. Again, I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physically they are providing that level of protection, but just anecdotally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I go to a concert and I’m not wearing earplugs, you know, my ears ring and are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sore or hurt afterwards. After this, after wearing these for almost an entire concert,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my ears felt totally fine afterwards, as if I hadn’t just been to a very loud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concert. They seem to have worked, physically speaking, And certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the audio front, they worked exceptionally well compared to everything else out there. Yes, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still didn’t sound exactly right because it was trying to be smart, and it would vary a lot as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I moved around and stuff, or as the music changed. So again, I would love that kind of dumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduction mode, just like a fixed uniform reduction. That would be amazing. Whatever form
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that takes, that would bring AirPods Pro to even more use cases. cases. And yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other than that, they’re already very, very good for this purpose. So again, I’m not a doctor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if this is providing the kind of protection that actual earplugs provide. And certainly like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s, there’s a level of like decibel protection that earplugs do, and this is not going to provide like massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protection for everyday use in like a loud, you know, if you’re like operating a jackhammer at a construction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco site, you’re going to want something that’s actually made for that purpose. But for For occasional concert going,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPods Pro worked the best of all the concert earplugs I’ve ever tried.
⏹️ ▶️ John They sell different tips for the AirPods. You can buy third party ones. I think that would probably affect the sound, the passive
⏹️ ▶️ John sound blocking ability tremendously because the Apple ones are just that flimsy little thin membrane,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And they have other ones that are like made of thick, dense foam that I have to think blocks more sound than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock ones. The sound blocking amount, I think, is controlled more by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transparency algorithm. And if you say attenuate loud sounds, you don’t get to set what threshold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is considered as loud. Like, above what threshold do you attenuate? That’s not a setting. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s more to do in software, really. Because if they’re actually doing full attenuation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and noise canceling, they’re pretty powerful. They can achieve quite a lot. I mean, you know, typical concert earplugs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might be getting like eight to 12 decibels of reduction, maybe 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the most. Like you’re not getting a ton of reduction unless you really make the sound really bad. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ones that, the really, you know, the higher reduction ones, the higher you go, the worse things sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the non-uniform suppression of things. Like it becomes, basically the more you suppress, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more bass heavy everything becomes, the more muffled. You lose a lot more treble, you don’t lose as much bass,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything just becomes muffled. But anyway, they’re so close to being amazing for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this purpose. They’re already great for it. They’re so close to being amazing. They just need that setting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JP in the chat room, apparently is in live entertainment and has suggested a company called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Coda Room and they have custom high fidelity earplugs which apparently attenuate 9, 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 25 decibels. But interestingly and importantly, they actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a graph that shows exactly the frequency response and attenuation across all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these different frequencies. So it looks pretty flat to my eyes, but I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well outside my comfort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zone. Well, okay, so first of all, these are like ideal cases. Second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice how this graph, the highest frequency on it is 8,000 hertz, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the bars drop precipitously right as they approach that, which suggests to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just for reference, like human hearing goes up to, at the best, about 20,000 hertz and for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adults, you’re probably in the teens somewhere, like 15,000 hertz, maybe 16. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for these to drop off heavily at 8,000 means they’re gonna have the same problem everything else has, which is basically there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of bass, there’s no treble.
Rewind.ai Pendant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Our favorite topic from the last year or so has come back around and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey become relevant again. Rewind.ai. This is the thing, the live streams.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We need a, I don’t know, not a Viber slap, obviously, but we need some sort of dumb musical instrument for that. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live streams are something that Rewind.ai is basically trying to do. But the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is you can’t have a live stream of all of your life when you’re running software. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to have have a live stream of things that happen outside of software, you would need hardware. So John, what is the pendant?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is interesting because live streams, when I first brought up on the show, I was remembering a, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John a computer user interface that lets you organize everything you’ve done on the computer as a, uh, a stream
⏹️ ▶️ John of events from the present to the past that you could fly through and see, what did I do yesterday? A week ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John two weeks ago. Anyway. Um, but live stream is also the, that same term was used for what
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware approach of what about when I’m just walking around during the day and I want to keep track of everything that happened
⏹️ ▶️ John to me during the day and they have all sorts of people at MIT and other schools over the over the decades that have like I’m just gonna wear a camera
⏹️ ▶️ John for an entire year I’m gonna record audio everywhere that I go so rewind.ai
⏹️ ▶️ John is making a hardware product that they’re calling the rewind pendant which looks like a little tiny cylinder
⏹️ ▶️ John that goes on a little lanyard around your neck so you wear this little necklace with a little tiny cylinder it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like a microphone and it It records everything that it hears and
⏹️ ▶️ John transcribes it and encrypts it and lets you search it. So the Rewind.ai software
⏹️ ▶️ John product that we talked about in the past was the thing that runs on your Mac and records everything that happens on your screen, including
⏹️ ▶️ John OCRing text out of Windows and stuff like that and recording audio and compiling
⏹️ ▶️ John it and making it so you can search it. This extends that to audio
⏹️ ▶️ John whenever you’re wearing this pendant. I don’t think this product is out yet. It’s on pre-order now for $60.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this shows kind of where we are in the technology stack, where
⏹️ ▶️ John this type of thing of gathering audio, basically having a cheap
⏹️ ▶️ John battery-powered microphone, and then being able to process that
⏹️ ▶️ John audio into something useful through transcription and some smarts using these,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, machine learning we used to call it, but now I guess everything’s AI, these language models that we’ve trained to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to understand whatever language that this thing is gonna support. And then it just becomes text, and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John can smush that text down really easily and make it searchable and do all the things, right? This pendant,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like, is a natural extension of the Rewind company’s whole deal, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John over the course of your life, you encounter things, you say things, things are said to you, you see things and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, but you might forget it, and you wanna say, what did that person say to me yesterday,
⏹️ ▶️ John or what happened in that meeting, or where did I see that webpage? And that’s why I’ve always wanted live streams,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this company is trying to bring it to you. As you can imagine, as we discussed with the computer screen recording
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, the privacy implications of this are mind-blowing because
⏹️ ▶️ John when, you know, as always, technology is ahead of both our culture
⏹️ ▶️ John and our laws because all of a sudden it is possible technologically to
⏹️ ▶️ John record everything that happens around you and transcribe it and store it and do a lot of stuff, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not something that people expect to be happening. And so like, what’s the deal with that?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, if I wear this and it records everybody around me, is that against the law? Am I going
⏹️ ▶️ John to get in trouble? Am I going to get beat up? What the rewind company, of course, is trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the best it can to say, well, we don’t know what the deal with this is, either culturally or legally. So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make it as, you know, do it as carefully as possible where it’s opt in.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to get an agreement, a verbal agreement that the thing hears. Although, obviously, if you can hear your agreement, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John already listening to you. But anyway, just don’t think about it too much. And then only
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s opt-in will you record things and it will record, it’ll summarize them again with the magic of AI slash
⏹️ ▶️ John machine learning. It will summarize it and not say verbatim. And obviously this is, you know, once they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done all that to me, it’s probably inadmissible in court and everything. But like, this is the path we’re traveling here. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the analogy that I thought of is like the advent of photography. Before there was photography, the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea of someone capturing an image of you anywhere was just like, what are they gonna do? sit down and sketch me on a piece of paper.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, I’ll just run away before they finish the drawing, it’s fine. They’re certainly not gonna paint me in full color. But what if I
⏹️ ▶️ John told you I could capture an image of you instantly? How will society deal with this? And it took just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I don’t know if it’s centuries, decades, for us to get laws on the book that say, where and when
⏹️ ▶️ John is it legal for you to take a picture of somebody else without their consent? And every country and every
⏹️ ▶️ John municipality and everything has different laws, but as a society, we’ve come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John A semi-reasonable set of things that deal with that. I think, once again, technology has outrun
⏹️ ▶️ John the law with the advent of the quote unquote camera phone. Because now, it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was when these laws were written when it’s like, oh, you know, paparazzi photographers that we’re worried about, or people with a camera, or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now everybody has a camera with them all the time. And so you see conflict of like the police not
⏹️ ▶️ John wanting themselves to be recorded, because now the police are constantly being recorded because everyone’s got a phone, and they push back against
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And, you know, or like imagine if we got camera technology that allowed our phones
⏹️ ▶️ John to have like a 500X optical zoom with a good quality. If that technology ever arrived, there’s a whole new set
⏹️ ▶️ John of things like, well, technically I was following the laws because you’re in public and I’m here and I’m there. Like, luckily the
⏹️ ▶️ John paparazzi laws have helped a little bit with that because paparazzi are motivated to use these really long lenses. So I’m sure there’s, at least in California,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s probably laws in the books about that. But the advance of technology, allowing us to do things that
⏹️ ▶️ John we never worried about before requires us to think about these issues
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably make laws related to them. But here’s rewind out there, pushing the envelope,
⏹️ ▶️ John because we all see the utility in this. Like if you describe this, we all say, this would be great. I would love
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to basically have an outboard memory, have the computers keep track of stuff for me. It’s like having,
⏹️ ▶️ John in an ideal case, a personal assistant with you at all times, where you can just ask them, like, you know, when you see on these politicians
⏹️ ▶️ John where they have the person who’s always behind them, like a Gary on Veep, but competent, where you can just ask them
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. Who is this? Who am I talking to? What did they say yesterday? Where are we going? Blah, blah, blah. People want that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they would like it to be magic and automatic for them with tiny devices they carry with them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can’t have that without also having everybody recording everything all the time everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, I’m not sure how we’re gonna square that because a lot of the utility
⏹️ ▶️ John of this type of thing comes from the ubiquity. When it’s you on your own computer, you can choose the level of ubiquity.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Rewind software, A, you could just not run it, so that’s fine. But if you do run it, you can control which applications it can
⏹️ ▶️ John see, you can control when it’s on and when it’s off. You know it’s confined to the little world of you, your computer, and your computer’s microphone
⏹️ ▶️ John and camera. So if you’re, you know, leave the house, you know your computer’s not following you and recording you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know? But the pendant is around your neck, and now we need a whole set of rules for this. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think probably the technology with this thing and the jankiness of the transcription and everything is gonna be limiting.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think this is, because it is starting to be possible, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is something that other companies will pursue. And I will say, personally, I think it’s something they should
⏹️ ▶️ John pursue because the benefits are tremendous. But of course, the downsides are also tremendous.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I hope that as we travel this road, I mean, it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to be hopeful, at least in our country, about our ability to make new laws that
⏹️ ▶️ John correctly constrain technology without stifling it
⏹️ ▶️ John or without leaving it completely unconstrained due to regulatory capture or whatever, like we have all the badness and
⏹️ ▶️ John not the goodness there, but I feel like eventually, the planet Earth as a society will
⏹️ ▶️ John construct social norms and laws surrounding this process so that we can get some of the benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John without all of the terrible downsides.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We can hope. When I first saw this pendant thing breeze through the news,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yeah, it isn’t out yet, and it’s not even out soon, I think. It seems like they’re kind of just starting to develop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it now. But when I saw it breeze through, I had the same thoughts as everyone else like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this sounds like it would be massively privacy invading for all the people around you all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. You know, strangers walking by could have one of these at any time. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. But it does, it does kind of make sense that it’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photo capture. There is a difference in degree that if this thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always recording in the background. Now, yes, I know, I like I watched the video of the guy saying like, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how we’re gonna do privacy features on this maybe. And they’re just ideas. They’re not actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, done and created and tested and working. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frankly, I think the, you know, as John said about, you know, the utility comes from ubiquity, like the features that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they mentioned of like, oh, we’ll have it just be opt in. The only people who opted in to be recorded will have, will have their voices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recorded. First of all, I don’t buy for a minute that would work very well. But second of all, that makes it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way less useful. And so if, if that is actually an option to be turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off, most people will just turn it off. The reality is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to have a perfect memory. And what got me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, for a split second, interested in this thing is when somebody was like, wow, wouldn’t it be nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to remember the person’s name that they introduced themselves to you five minutes ago in the conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They quickly said their name, you have since forgotten it. And you’re like, God, what was this person’s name again?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They told me a few minutes ago, and it slipped my mind. I forgot. I would love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. That would be amazing. That would be life-changing for me. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John goal of the AR glasses that we always talk about. What’s the killer app for the AR glasses? Names that float over people’s heads. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John combine that with a ubiquitous recording, it’s like, well, how would it know the name to float over their head? Well, if they told it to you earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ John then it knows it because it can associate it with the face that spoke the words that said, my name is blah, blah, blah. And then it can transcribe it
⏹️ ▶️ John and stick it over the thing. Like, it all will work out. And speaking of glasses, what is
⏹️ ▶️ John the company that did it? Was it Snapchat that did the glasses with cameras in them that were recording all the time, right? Doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook still make those? Yeah, I think they do. So his thing, the technology is getting there for this type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rewind, I think I’m taking more seriously just because they’ve proven the utility with the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that runs on your Mac, essentially. Like it has utility and it works, and it’s not trying to record
⏹️ ▶️ John video all the time and everything, right? It’s just audio, so it’s lower bandwidth and it can transcribe
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But the video approach, like people can, again, these MIT things from the 80s where someone’s like, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John wear a video camera on my head, for an entire year in the 80s, and it was ridiculous looking. But now,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get a very tiny camera that people might not even be able to see that’s recording video all the time through like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny tether that’s going down to like a SSD that’s in your pocket or wherever. Like we have the technology to do this already,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not socially acceptable. To your point, Marco, if you started every conversation with, do you mind if I record
⏹️ ▶️ John you? People wouldn’t wanna talk to you real fast. It’d be like, that’s the guy who always asks if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can opt into recording and people be like, what? No, we’re not ready for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re also not ready for, by the way, you never know who’s secretly recording you. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John that, A, that’s probably not legal in lots of places and B, people don’t want that to happen. They don’t wanna know that it happened after
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact and if you say, oh yeah, no, I record everybody all the time because I turned off the opt-in feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, people aren’t gonna wanna talk to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Yeah, and there’s so many differences when you’re talking about this kind of feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or this kind of product. It’s very different to say, I’m gonna carry something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my pocket that makes it easy for me to record stuff when I want to, versus I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be wearing something that is always recording everything without my input. Those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very different things. There’s obviously, as John said, like, you know, cameras got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller and easier and better and more ubiquitous. And so that changed the photo and video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco angle pretty significantly over the last few decades. but ambient recording of everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around you and all the people around you without you having to choose to record it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to at least and also to be physically looking like you’re recording it, that becomes a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very different thing. You know, there’s gonna be a lot of, you know, just like the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rewind product for the regular desktop capture thing, there’s gonna be a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unintended capture or unwanted capture. And that’s going to cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of problems, both privacy-wise, legally, like it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s like all the tubes in our house, like the Amazon Echoes and all the other things that are always
⏹️ ▶️ John listening, because again, that’s how they can hear you say, hey, Dingus, they’re always listening. And those little
⏹️ ▶️ John recordings, and then like, law enforcement of course gets wind of this, and they’re like, can we subpoena
⏹️ ▶️ John the surreptitious recordings from people’s accidental activations of their Amazon? And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if these things sold to anybody, you know law enforcement would be like, everybody who was in that area at the time was wearing
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these pendants. We’re gonna subpoena all your recordings and subpoena all your transcripts. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, law enforcement and we’ll always take advantage of every possible, like the ring doorbell cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? The whole, just- Those are all police cameras. Yeah, so this is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to happen and we have to, you know, come up with laws and norms
⏹️ ▶️ John around this that don’t allow things to swing wildly in one direction or the other. Free-for-all
⏹️ ▶️ John recording of everything is terrible. The ability of law enforcement to get a recording of everything everywhere is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just ask people in the UK, I suppose. Because my understanding is that they have a much more ubiquitous
⏹️ ▶️ John video recording of public spaces there than we have here. But again, utility.
⏹️ ▶️ John The utility for actually catching criminals is there. It’s good. It exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John abuse of it is bad, but you know, appropriate use of it, kind of like everything else, like
⏹️ ▶️ John telephone conversations, video recording, we have all sorts of laws about what is and isn’t admissible
⏹️ ▶️ John as evidence and what law enforcement can and can’t do for technologies that have been around for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But suddenly when you throw something like this, like, oh, we went from nobody having cameras on their front door to
⏹️ ▶️ John a huge number of people having cameras in their front door, faster than we could gather laws around this,
⏹️ ▶️ John or faster than we could gather social norms around, Should I buy this device? Should I join the neighborhood
⏹️ ▶️ John watch thing where we all share all our front door recordings with the police? Or should I not do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, so it’s just, I do feel like the technology is definitely way out ahead
⏹️ ▶️ John of how we can handle it. But you know, there’s no, the alternative isn’t like, well, we’ll just stop this technology
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s never gonna happen, right? The advantages of making cameras smaller and making lower power things and
⏹️ ▶️ John doing AI powered transcription, those advantages are too good to ignore. We should
⏹️ ▶️ John pursue that because it makes things better for everybody. We just have to worry about the downsides
⏹️ ▶️ John and deal with them rather than saying, okay, well, I’m just gonna pretend we’re not gonna progress because we are,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think we should.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but you wear one of these things to your job, you’re getting fired. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there’s no way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your job is gonna make you wear one of these for compliance reasons, and they’re gonna check the
⏹️ ▶️ John transcripts every day, and they’re gonna see if you’re leaking secrets. You kidding? The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco workplace loves this crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Recording, they already, we talked about this with Rewind.ai, that workplaces, there’s already a breed enterprise software
⏹️ ▶️ John that records everything you do on your screen and sees if you’re like goofing off or playing solitaire if you’re not moving the
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse enough or if you’re not being productive like they’re gonna love this they’re not gonna let you bring in your own but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna make you wear one that they have and that is again a situation where I think social norms need to come in with
⏹️ ▶️ John like yeah since you’re not legally required to work for this company you can just quit if you don’t like it but if everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John company company doesn’t that’s kind of crappy so we kind of have to have pushback from labor as as they
⏹️ ▶️ John call it, to say, here’s what isn’t OK as a society to allow
⏹️ ▶️ John the workplace to demand of us. Like working more than 40 hours a day without overtime pay,
⏹️ ▶️ John not getting weekends off, all the things that the labor movement has given us, it needs to give us some more things
⏹️ ▶️ John as our boss starts finding new and interesting technology to try to make
⏹️ ▶️ John more money for them, but more misery for everyone else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco god. That’s terrifying, but correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For what it’s worth, in the explanatory video that Rewind put up, they said in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two days, they got over 3,100 pre-orders. They also made mention, I think, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said this a minute ago, they said that they’ve had a couple of theories about how they can make their privacy safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, they’ll be parsing everything they hear and they can do speaker detection, you know, as in who is speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they can figure out, oh, this person said, yes, you can record me. And then, oh, we’re good to go. which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is both clever and creepy. But the other thing they said was, hey, look, what if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we only store summaries rather than verbatim conversations? Because then it’s just like having a really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good note taker around you always. Here again, I see what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going for. It does make sense. A little creepy, but I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get it. And I thought those were at least semi-reasonable approaches to try to ensure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some modicum of privacy and safety.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, first of all, I think those are very optimistic, you know, that, that they would be able to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliably. And again, again, like if they, if that was optional, nobody would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enable that option. Like the option of only store this middle of minimal amount or only record
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who said it, no, that nobody would enable that option. If that was, if that was optional. Um, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even then, like, you know, the summaries, like real, real conversations are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, you know, messy and organic and all over the place. First of all, you assume it can hear you well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to have accurate transcriptions and to hear everything. That’s a big assumption
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, but you know, whatever. Assuming it gets better, that it can actually capture everything. You know, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, there’s gonna be, you know, it’s gonna be like, do you think she liked me? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then, you know, no, she was just being nice. Like, people are gonna use it for like, you know, dumb stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you’re only storing the summary, What if the summary’s wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then you will have this now incorrect record of the conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you think is a record of the conversation. Like you think, well, this is what was recorded and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the summary of what was recorded. You think that’s correct and you treat it as fact or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you treat it as reliable, you treat it as correct. What if it’s not correct? Even a little bit off, what if it missed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some nuance? There are just so many things where like, I don’t think that option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a very good option. I’m like, oh, we’ll just store summaries. No, that’s not a great option.
⏹️ ▶️ John For a $60 device, too, we’ve all had the experience with our $1,000 phone where we
⏹️ ▶️ John say, hey, dingus, remind me to blah, blah, blah. And then later in the day, we look at reminders, and it says
⏹️ ▶️ John some word, salad. We’re like, what the hell was this?
⏹️ ▶️ John it transcribed it wrong? That’s one sentence. That’s one literal sentence that it’s trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to say verbatim. And it does it so badly that you get a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s so far off that you’re trying to sound it out. What did it think it hurt? It’s a challenging environment.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you’re on the go, the pendants are on your neck. So forget about summary, straight transcription is hard enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, obviously this will get better with time, but that’s part of the challenge. And I do wonder if our use
⏹️ ▶️ John of all of our assistants on our phones will culturally prepare us
⏹️ ▶️ John for the idea that yeah, it’s probably not gonna be accurate. Even as it gets better and better and better over the years,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of built-in cultural distrust of like, oh, sometimes it messes up. Sometimes autocomplete
⏹️ ▶️ John types bogus things. Sometimes speech to text gets it wrong in challenging environments.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not entirely trustworthy. I think it would take many generations of near 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John accuracy for us to culturally believe it. So we can thank the poor performance
⏹️ ▶️ John of our voice assistants now for training generations of people
⏹️ ▶️ John not to trust this. And this whole topic, by the way, lets me pull out the
⏹️ ▶️ John title of the Philip K. Dick story, which I already used in one of my hypercritical posts from way back, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John is endlessly applicable. In my post on hypercritical was about remastered
⏹️ ▶️ John games where they’ll take an old video game, but like sell you a new version where all the graphics have been redone
⏹️ ▶️ John for the current generation. So it’s the same game and the same mechanics, but it’s high
⏹️ ▶️ John definition, it’s a new texture pack, it’s even better geometry, different lighting. And the title of the Philip K. Dick story
⏹️ ▶️ John is, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. That should be the tagline for this Rewind.ai company,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can remember it for your wholesale.
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#askatp: Why Apple’s chips are good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, you want to do some Ask ATP?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with Buckaroo Ponzi. Ponzi? Ponzi? Ponzi?
⏹️ ▶️ John Ponzi? It’s Ponzi, but it’s supposed to be like Buckaroo Bonzi, the movie. Is it Ponzi Beach
⏹️ ▶️ John five, Marko. We were pronouncing that wrong even when we thought we were doing it right, so, you know. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, Buckaroo P writes, what is so much better about Apple’s chip designs besides tailoring to their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own needs and monopsony access to smaller process nodes, they must have some design principle or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey innovation that stops Samsung and Qualcomm from catching up, right? I mean, I think, John, you’re probably best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey equipped to answer this. But I think, to me, the number one thing that Apple does incredibly well is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their chips are fast, but they’re also incredibly power efficient, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not something that’s easy to do, be both fast and power efficient, but what’s your answer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so here’s the thing with Apple’s lead on chips. It is shrinking,
⏹️ ▶️ John it still exists, but it is shrinking. And what gave them that lead in
⏹️ ▶️ John the end is two things. One is what they’re saying like exclusive, because they
⏹️ ▶️ John have the most money, they can pay for the access to the best fabrication process. And at various
⏹️ ▶️ John times in the past, having access to the best fabrication process has been a huge advantage. It remains to to be
⏹️ ▶️ John seen if having exclusive access to three nanometers from TSMC is going to be a huge advantage. We still have question marks about that
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the phone chips that we’ve seen, but in the past definitely when Apple had a better process than their
⏹️ ▶️ John competitors that made a big difference. But the second one is the boring answer to most technology questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s people. Apple bought PA semi, which had a bunch of people in it
⏹️ ▶️ John who were good at designing chips. Chips aren’t designed by robots or computers. They’re designed by people. If If you have
⏹️ ▶️ John the best people, you get the best chips. Apple bought that advantage by buying
⏹️ ▶️ John a company filled with really smart people and then giving them lots of money and hiring new smart people to make
⏹️ ▶️ John their own line of chips. And that’s worked out really well for them. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of those people have since left Apple and formed their new company called Nuvia, which was then acquired by Qualcomm.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now Qualcomm is using its Nuvia acquisition, which presumably has a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of good people to help Qualcomm chips be better. That’s part of the reason the gap is narrowing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It all comes down to people. Who has the best chip designers? The people who know the most about
⏹️ ▶️ John chips with the most experience who can make these chips. And on top of that, finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John a somewhat distant third is, of course, Apple can make chips that are exactly tailored to what they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Qualcomm can also make chips exactly tailored to what they want, but they are serving many
⏹️ ▶️ John customers. They don’t have their own phones that they make, so it’s more difficult to them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is super important for like bringing in that last couple of percent out because Apple can just, especially for the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, because let’s be honest, like when they’re making the chip for the phone, they’re like, we’re gonna make exactly the chip that we want.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when it comes time to make the chips for the Mac, they’re like, okay, here’s the guts we have from the phone thing. Here’s what we have to do to make it good on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John What else can we add? But it’s not like they’re making the cores specifically tailored to the Mac at this point. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that advantage of making everything perfectly custom for what Apple wants it to be used for tails
⏹️ ▶️ John off a little bit as evidenced in the worst case scenario obviously by the Mac Pro where Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John not made a chip that’s exactly what they need for the Mac Pro. They just absolutely haven’t. Intel didn’t make it for
⏹️ ▶️ John them in the Xeons because the Xeons had a bunch of crap that Apple didn’t want and weren’t made the way Apple wanted them to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now that Apple makes its own chips, Apple’s also going, oh now I see why Intel never made the chip that we wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John because we would be only customers for it and we don’t sell a lot of these computers. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the advantages people and that advantage only lasts as long as those people last. Either
⏹️ ▶️ John those people, you know, those people can retire or in the case of many of the good people who worked on Apple Silicon, a lot of them
⏹️ ▶️ John have went off to start a new company that got acquired by Apple’s competitor, which is not good for them. But hey, new people
⏹️ ▶️ John are coming out of school every day and getting hired on and that’s that’s the competition in the tech sector,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially in this area where having a small number like a few hundred of the really
⏹️ ▶️ John best smartest, most experienced people with the best ideas can have a
⏹️ ▶️ John huge effect because chip design is like look, if you get that right, that has ripple
⏹️ ▶️ John effects that go throughout your entire product line, kind of like you know, product design, having a Johnny Iver,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever has such an outsized advantage versus like someone who’s just like, I’m really good at writing
⏹️ ▶️ John software. And I wrote a really good version of this application that ships with every computer, it’s probably not going have as big
⏹️ ▶️ John an effect as the people who do the chips or the general product design. But That’s what it comes down to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple chips are people.
#askatp: Partitions for user data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alfred Flynn writes, do you all separate your personal data, such as photos, from the rest of Mac OS, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by putting it on a separate partition or even an external drive? As a developer myself, many developer tools have almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unrestricted access to the file system. I want to keep personal data on the same drive as Mac OS for convenience, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the risks of accidentally installing a bad dependency or the authors of a dependency going rogue have been giving me pause.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used to do this way back in the day on Windows computers. This is something I picked up from my dad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He would use the C drive. John, just hush. He would use the C drive for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the OS and things like that. And I think he used, like, he would make a partition D for data,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if memory serves, and then E would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gotta skip D, because that’s the CD-ROM drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, maybe you’re right. It’s been so long. But yeah, you’re probably right. But you know what I’m saying. It was something along those lines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re reserving A and B for your floppy drives, of course. Exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a little place for, let’s have some unity between the poor
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows slobs and the beautiful Mac users. We’ve talked about this in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is Command Shift 3 screenshot? Well, it’s because Command Shift 1 and 2 are eject floppy drive 1 and eject floppy
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drive C on Windows? Well, that’s because A and B are the two floppy drives. So the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ John having two floppy drives and giving them like the good drive letters or the good keyboard shortcuts is still with
⏹️ ▶️ John us to this day. That’s why Command Shift 3 is still Command Shift 3. They never changed it, even though we no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John have two floppy drives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, for whatever it’s worth, I, one of the first things I do when setting up a new Mac because I remap Command Shift 3 to Command
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Shift 1. It’s easier.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Well, see, Windows is still like, the hard drive still defaults to C in like Windows 11, doesn’t it? So they
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t gotten past that either. You have to save room for your floppy drives in your brand new PCs. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you don’t want me to harp on that, but drive letters, come on, people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used to do this back in the Windows days for me, but I haven’t done it since. And no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t do anything like this with macOS. John, you talked a lot last time. Marco, what is your approach?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we’ll get to John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you, I used to do it in my Windows days. And the reason why was because being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Windows Power user, formatting and reinstalling the OS is a fairly common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operation. I would do that about maybe once a year or so. And it was much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier to know that if my user data is on this other partition, that I can format the C partition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without worrying that I’m going to lose stuff. So that was pretty much what I did and why I did it back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then. As soon as I went to Mac, first of all, I started out on laptops where I didn’t have multiple drives and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t make a lot of sense to have multiple partitions. And so I just never understood how to have it on the Mac. And I found it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly not a problem. I mean, for Alfred’s, not the software, for the right air of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question, for Alfred’s purpose here of developer tools having unrestricted access,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really have that issue because most of my development is in Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I also hardly ever install any kind of third party stuff. So I heard they ever installed third party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer tools or libraries or things like that. And Xcode is actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern Xcode stuff is pretty well sandboxed. Even like if you get like, you know, Swift packages and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have like, you know, build steps as part of a Swift package, those have very little access to anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like everything is sandboxed and all of that. And so it’s actually fairly safe. But my general approach to my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac security is, you know, I will let the OS sandbox and protect things to whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree, Certain things require full disk access. I, you know, things like backup tools, which we’ll get to soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will allow those as needed, but only for stuff that really makes sense. I’m not like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pasting terminal commands into terminal, like letting things go nuts. So I don’t really have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of, you know, security concern of that. And if something ever did go rogue, that’s what I have backups for.
⏹️ ▶️ John So practically speaking, trying to keep things in separate buckets is
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying. And the Mac operating system does not want you to do it. In earlier days
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac OS X, there was sort of built-in support carried over from the next step days
⏹️ ▶️ John of much better support for keeping things in separate bins, having your user directories
⏹️ ▶️ John on a different drive than your operating system, like actually a different physical drive, not just like
⏹️ ▶️ John a different partition, having network home directories. There was the whole thing of like your home directory
⏹️ ▶️ John would be on your iPod. Do you remember that? You connected with Firewire.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, but as time has gone on, those features have either slowly departed
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac operating system or become so buggy as to be useless or inadvisable.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the path of least resistance is to put everything
⏹️ ▶️ John on the same drive. Now, practically speaking, in terms of security, Alfred says, as a developer myself,
⏹️ ▶️ John many developer tools have unrestricted access to the file system. If that means like full disk access, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually know the answer to this, but does full disk access provide programs
⏹️ ▶️ John that have it with full access to all mounted drives? Or is that the separate access and external drive
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I’m not sure, but anyway, multiple partitions of the same drive, I think full disk
⏹️ ▶️ John access definitely does give you. And if you have an internal drive, if you’re one of the few people who has a computer that has multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John internal drives and can run Mac OS, I think full disk access would probably access that too.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think the annoyance of trying to put things in separate buckets is not worth
⏹️ ▶️ John the hassle. It’s not worth the bugs, it’s not worth the hassle, it’s not worth the management of space. Oh, I filled up
⏹️ ▶️ John this bucket, but that bucket has plenty of space left on it and I have to try to rebalance. I would not advise
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. I don’t personally do it, even though I do have multiple drives. Most of them are just backups of the one big one.
⏹️ ▶️ John My ideal scenario is kind of like the one biggest monitor I can get. I want the one biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John boot drive I can get that has all my stuff on it. And then everything else is ancillary. I’ve got a NAS, I’ve got some spare drives or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I just want everything to be in all one place. You could, if you really wanted to, with the magic of APFS,
⏹️ ▶️ John divide up your boot drive into a series of partitions that all stay at the same storage, so you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John worry about one bucket filling up because they’re all just fighting all the time over the same pool of storage. But then, still, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of different things mounted and a bunch of different paths, and it’s just, for me, it’s too cumbersome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Use folders. Don’t use partitions. Don’t use drives. If you need to organize your stuff, use folders.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in terms of protecting things security-wise, I don’t think it’s worth trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to protect things and it may be useless anyway if the full disk access permission gives things access
#askatp: iPad photo backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And finally, Joseph Zoller writes, I’ve been a Mac user for work and personal uses for the last 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years, but I’ve been using an iPad exclusively for non-work stuff for the last year. As a parent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of young children, I manage a large library of photos on the iPad and realize that other than Apple Photos Sync
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and iOS backups to iCloud or Apple, I don’t have a hard drive or a third-party cloud backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the family’s precious memories. Is there an easy or approved way to create an export or backup of all my photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my iOS or iPadOS library? You’ve talked extensively about your own workflows on the Mac, but curious about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a solution for the iPad. Oof, I got nothing. I guess you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also use Google Photos and I think it’ll do all the importing to Google Photos from what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iPad as well, I say with no certainty whatsoever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t have any good answers on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the problem is, I don’t think there is a good answer for this one. You know, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the major downsides of an iOS only lifestyle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I think is very relevant because a lot of people, they might not be iPad only, but a lot of people are iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only or iPhone primary, or for a lot of people, the iPhone is their only Apple device, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people have this issue of like all of their photos, hopefully they have the iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup of their photos, which that alone is a huge thing, especially the dumb 5 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, but all of their photos are in this system. They don’t have any of their backups.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s entirely this system. That is very, very common for millions of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think part of the problem here is, on the Mac, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have tools like Backblaze or Time Machine or Cloners and things like that. You have other options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for backups, many of which are very, very good. And on iOS, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just don’t have that access. Apps can’t do it. And the good thing is, as I was saying earlier, with the lack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an iCloud backup for Mac, the good thing is that Apple’s backup is very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s great, and that’s what most people do most of the time, but what if it doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you? What if you get locked out of your Apple ID?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if somehow that goes wrong for you, that system breaks for you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a problem. What if you get Matt Honand? Like if somebody logs in, uses remote Find My to delete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all your stuff off all your devices and then changes your Apple ID password. Like, what if one of these people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were just talking a few months ago, what Joanna Stern broke in the Wall Street Journal about how there’s a scam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people looking at your passcode in a bar and then taking your phone, taking your passcode, changing your Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco password, locking you out of everything. If that happens and your only backup system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this system, that’s a bit of a problem, to put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mildly. And so I think it’s very nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the mass market has this option for easy, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatic, mostly everyone has this available to them, backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the most important stuff that is captured or stored on an iPhone or iPad. That’s great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you want more protection, and I would suggest anybody nerdy enough to listen to this show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should probably want that, I would strongly suggest getting something else in place. And unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if you’re iOS only, I don’t think that’s possible. By the way, all of this presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will also apply to Vision OS, because Vision OS seems very, very much based on iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS and iOS. So it seems like it’s going to work the same way. So what I would suggest doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is get some kind of cheap used Mac, put it in a closet with a bunch of water on top of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it just sit in there with your user account logged in and with photos there, downloading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco originals, get enough storage that you can fit your entire photo library on it with originals,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then run Backblaze on that. Get a Mac somehow and run Backblaze on it. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good fail-safe backup. Because if this stuff is that important to you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worth it. This doesn’t need to be a good or recent Mac, it just needs to run a recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS. So it can be like somebody’s used Mac Mini, some old iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something, whatever you have the space for, the budget for, It doesn’t have to be good, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the best solution here. And I wish there were better options, but there aren’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two things on this topic, one based on what we discussed before about the cultural cultural adjusting
⏹️ ▶️ John to changes in technology. I feel like we’ve kind of gotten to the point now where
⏹️ ▶️ John it is culturally the norm to use the cloud backup
⏹️ ▶️ John provided by your device and to accept anything that happens
⏹️ ▶️ John to you as just like, you know, it’s a tragedy, but sometimes that happens. Like it’s rare.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s probably not going to happen to you. And if it does happen, it’s just like it’s like getting struck by lightning. Oh, it’s a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s rare enough that like that. They’re just doing that. They’re just relying on Apple’s iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John backups, relying on Google photos or whatever. That’s what everybody does. No one’s ever going to blame you
⏹️ ▶️ John for just doing that. And we as tech nerds know the weaknesses of it. But if tragedy
⏹️ ▶️ John befalls you and you lose all your family photos, there’ll be a story about you in the local newspaper and everyone will be sad for you, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just one of those things that happens. And tech nerds don’t find that acceptable. So we want
⏹️ ▶️ John another solution. That’s why Joseph is writing in and we’re trying to find solutions. And the second point is
⏹️ ▶️ John access to those better solutions on the Apple platforms, it shows how much
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple continues to lean on the Mac because the Mac can do so many things that all the other
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms can’t. Apple keeps making new platforms and none of them have the flexibility
⏹️ ▶️ John for even third parties to provide solutions like this. Like iCloud backup is
⏹️ ▶️ John for your iPhone. Are there a lot of third party things that can backup and restore your entire phone? No, there
⏹️ ▶️ John are not. But there are third party things that can backup and mostly restore your entire Mac because the Mac is
⏹️ ▶️ John a more open platform. It’s one of the things I always fear with the Mac going away. We’re basically saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t backup my app, I want a second backup of my iPad, what can we do? Can I download an app from my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John that solves this problem? Probably not well. I mean, there’s no reason technically you shouldn’t be able to, USB-C, iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John plug it in SSD, have it backup all your things to it or whatever, but Apple’s not interested in pursuing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas the Mac already does it. You know, even with Apple’s own software, now you’ve got a local copy
⏹️ ▶️ John of your photos and now you’ve got a second cloud backup of your photos. And if someone compromises your Apple ID, guess what? You
⏹️ ▶️ John can still log into your Mac. And if your house burns down, guess what? Your photos are still in backblazer. You are taking your
⏹️ ▶️ John digital life into your own hands and providing a better solution. And so even though society will never blame you
⏹️ ▶️ John for like, I lost all my family photos. Isn’t that a sad story? I read it in the local paper. No one says those people should feel
⏹️ ▶️ John ashamed because everybody just uses you’re lucky if people use the cloud back I’ve had people wind up turn
⏹️ ▶️ John that on and then I’m using is they don’t want to pay for iCloud storage, right? That is the cultural norm. But I think it is unacceptable
⏹️ ▶️ John for things like photos. Again, people’s houses burst down or Merlin’s photos were in his garage and they got waterlogged
⏹️ ▶️ John and lost all his old photos like it happens. But there are things especially with digital stuff. There are things we can do to prevent
⏹️ ▶️ John that are way easier than trying to carefully preserve a bunch of physical photo albums. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you live somewhere where there’s flooding, or like your house burns down, just like we can do better with digital
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And Apple is trying to do better. I feel like iCloud backup is better than physical photo albums for
⏹️ ▶️ John resilience against tragedy. But we can do better still for the people who want to take that extra
⏹️ ▶️ John step, having to buy a Mac, because none of Apple’s other platforms, including like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco vision OS, can do anything to help you here. I think is a failure. And I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if I had to to steer the direction of all Apple’s platforms, I would definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John be steering them all towards the idea of let’s keep all the advantages that you found
⏹️ ▶️ John while also trying to open up these systems to have more functionality, but see
⏹️ ▶️ John every discussion of iPadOS for the past five years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that. Even like iPadOS and iOS, like I would love Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those platforms, even if Apple did it. and even if it’s only internal to the device.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just said we wanted iCloud backup for the Mac, but now we said, but also can we get the thing that the Mac has for everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else? Yeah, like how, I mean look, especially, I mean, geez, I can’t tell you the number of times that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my kid, especially when he was younger, mostly when he was younger, would like accidentally delete something he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had made in a game, like a level or a map or something, he would like accidentally delete something and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be crushed because there is no undo, there’s no recovery. And like on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a computer, on a Mac, I could just get his, get the files off time machine for that app or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stick them back in place and it would be fine. On iOS, you mostly can’t do that. Like there, you know, there are those tools where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can like plug it in and use like phone view or whatever. Like those tools, you could plug it in and deal with their directories directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and attempt that, which I actually have done for Minecraft before a long time ago for this reason. And it did work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t work for everything. And like, there’s no way on the device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, you know what, I really messed up my data in app X. please kick me back an hour to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it was an hour ago. Like you can’t do that. That would be an amazing feature. And I can see there’s certain reasons why they might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not wanna do it. I mean, I think a lot of apps assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain level of security of their own data directories that that would possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco violate. But the user benefits would be so great in situations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. I think that’s something they should seriously look into, honestly. But yeah, those options just don’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS. They’ve simplified them all away. And largely, the lack of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity is what makes those platforms so great in a lot of ways to a lot of people. But the downside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, again, just like everything else about iPadOS, when you hit a wall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no going around it. You just can’t. Whereas on a Mac, or on a PC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even on Android, usually whatever wall you hit, there’s usually a way around it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you just don’t have that on iOS, on iPadOS, and probably not a Vision OS either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Collide, and Clean Email. And thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join, and we will talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check podcast so long.
An optical-disc journey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So related to what we were just talking about, about data backup,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a little bit of a mini topic here that will fit perfectly in the post show. In our topic list,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my grab bag of possible tech topics, one of the entries there is an optical disk journey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, when I sent you my box of crap most recently, what was in it again?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a bunch of writable blu-ray disks that are good for a thousand years was a hundred years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous it’s a thousand because their M disk for millennial disk I guess oh my word I sent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you a little USB blu-ray drive and a small spindle of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blue blu-ray recordable M disks and the reason I sent this to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the the appeal of this the the reason I bought it is because I thought you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t hurt to have like a really good offline cold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup for really important stuff like my photos, like my family photos. I have all these online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, I have Backblaze, I have Time Machine, you know, we have iCloud Photos of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and those are all great, but those are all online. And if somebody really wanted to mess with my online life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they could possibly break into all those things, they’re all online, they could delete those accounts, they could,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever. Or I could, maybe I messed something up really badly, and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to have some kind of like cold storage, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of long-term cold storage backup for the most important, not everything on my computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the most important stuff, photos, documents, that kind of stuff. The problem with optical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disks, there’s been two major problems with using them over time for this. Number one, they’re just not big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough, like they don’t store enough data for any kind of modern data needs. You know, you would need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of them for most people’s modern libraries. And number two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recordable optical discs, until the M-Disc style was made, recordable optical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discs used organic dyes. And what that would mean is that they would break down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time. Like if you have old recorded CD-Rs or DVD-Rs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances are if they’re pretty old, they might not read anymore because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have probably degraded to the point where they will no longer read the data. Optical discs were not great for long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage. And other stuff like flash cards, like SD cards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are actually not that bad for long-term storage. They’re not that good, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that bad. They keep the data for a surprisingly long time, they’re very durable, they’re very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and data-dense in terms of how much you can fit in the amount of physical space, and they’re inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and easily accessible, easily readable. So SD cards are actually not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s more obscure things like tape, magnetic tape and stuff like that. That’s, I don’t know anything about
⏹️ ▶️ John Chisel all your photos into a stone tablet, they’ll probably keep for a few thousand years if you’re lucky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. But anyway, so there’s all these different options. Hard drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are actually not terrible either. One thing that concerns me about hard drives is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you record stuff on a hard drive and then just put it in a cabinet for 10, 20, 30 years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when you plug that back in, is it gonna actually work? Like that’s a lot of mechanical needs in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think over a long term, the odds of that just spinning up and working right after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a number of years of it just sitting around being idle. I don’t know if I would trust a hard drive in that case.
⏹️ ▶️ John We got the series of dongles that you would need to connect that hard drive. You’d have to get like a SATA to this, to that,
⏹️ ▶️ John to FireWire, to Thunderbolt, to optical, to magic wireless, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly. The
⏹️ ▶️ John longer you wait, the less likely you are even to have a device that can connect that hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that applies, by the way, to almost any of like almost any long-term computer storage solution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That problem exists of like, how do you read it in the future? Like what, what hardware is required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to read it? And is that even still available? And is that, can it connect to modern things like that? That does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become, you know, a bit of a problem. Anyway, the M disk came out and the M disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically a new technique and, and type of layer on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optical disks rather than using organic dye. And I don’t, forgive me. I don’t know the fine details of this, but rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using organic dye, it uses some kind of like etchable material that like physically etches the pattern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the layer so that it’s much more like a pressed disc and it’s it doesn’t degrade over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least not anywhere near what what organic ones do. So they they’ve been tested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and they they seem to be tested to last at least a hundred years under most tests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know obviously it’s hard to simulate this over over much over long spans but they think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they seem to be holding up to their to their claims of durability. So I bought that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive and those discs with a plan of doing this kind of big backup to for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos and it just never happened. The biggest reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that when you have to back up your roughly terabyte photo library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 25 gig BDX or BDR discs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Blu-ray recordable discs. That takes a lot of discs and a lot of juggling of stuff and a lot of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the project just never came together for me. And I mean I bought that years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well more recently the Blu-ray recordable market for the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who are using it is actually advancing fairly nicely or has advanced fairly nicely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Blu-ray discs originally stored 25 gigs for single layer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 50 gigs for dual layer and I don’t think dual layer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recordable discs were widely available at first. I could be wrong but so for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most part you’re looking at 25 gigs. Well in the intervening years since I last look they’ve made BDXL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discs which use even more layers somehow I have no idea how and they can fit a hundred gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per disc and they make them in the M disc formulation. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still you know, 10 discs for my photo library, but 10’s a lot better than 40.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So maybe I should try this. They’re fairly inexpensive. Like the drives are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about a hundred bucks that can do this. And the reason I sent you that drive, John, is that that drive can’t do this. Also that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive is like micro USB or it might’ve even been mini USB. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, you know, screw that noise. So I got a nice USB-C Pioneer slot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loading drive that does all the formats. It’s bus powered, so there’s no dumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power adapter. Bus powered via USB-C, USB 3 speeds, et cetera. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got a bunch of these BDXL M disks from Verbatim. They run,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you buy them in like, you know, five or 10 or 20 packs, they run something, I think something like five bucks per disk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which again, is not that cheap, you know, when they’re only 100 gigs. That isn’t actually super cheap, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five bucks for 100 gigs of like fairly strong, long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage, I consider that to be not that bad. especially considering I’m not storing terabytes and terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and terabytes of data here. I’m storing like a couple of terabytes total maybe. So I bought myself a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BDXL burning setup and I’ve gotten through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my entire photo library and half of my fish collection because I figure that’s worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backing up too. Of course. It’s only 200
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs, so it’s only two days. I feel like you have a pretty good distributed backup of your fish collection. All the
⏹️ ▶️ John other fish fans in the entire world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, but at some point, the band’s not gonna be existing anymore and they’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna shut down their live streaming service at some point that sells all these downloads and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I know it’s inexpensive, but I definitely would not be spending my time swapping just to back up something that is
⏹️ ▶️ John accessible through hundreds of other people on the internet. Your family photos, yes. Fish, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, anyway, I got this awesome little Pioneer Drive. It is truly USB-C bus powered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, one issue I ran into is that it takes some effort to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get Apple Photos to export the originals in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly exactly 100 gigabyte chunks. And because ideally what you want is you want to say, all right, disc
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, disc two, disc three, this disc covers this date range, this disc covers this date range. And photos are great. Photos make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this easy because you don’t have to worry about incremental backups over time. Like you know that if this disc contains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all your photos from 2018, you know you’re not gonna add more all of a sudden. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s easy, this is actually a really easy process to do with photos. And I should clarify, the M
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discs, as far as I know, they’re not ever rewritable. It’s only write once, which is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the best. Rewritable stuff always sucked.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it was an interesting choice to do export on modified originals. Like, I can see where you got to that, but it’s like, hey, a backup, why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I backup the original? But if, like me, I guess you’re not like me, but if, like me, you have put a significant
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of time into editing your photos, I would also want a backup of all my edited versions.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Like, maximum quality JPEGs of all the edits plus all the unmodified originals,
⏹️ ▶️ John which does significantly add to the size. But yeah, I was wondering how you’re doing this. And my approach when I was thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be, I would do export unmodified originals and also export the actual photos
⏹️ ▶️ John that had maximum quality JPEGs to an external drive as files on disk.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I would write a little script that would divide them up into folders sized to be under a terabyte each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s probably what I should have done. That’s not what I did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because I can imagine being in photos, where did I leave off and I’m dragging things into albums and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s probably what I’m going to do because I, so I did my entire library. I did not yet do Tiff’s library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t have access to her computer all the time. Like she’s using it. So, and I should, I’ll get to how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long this takes in a minute. So, so she’s using her computer. So like I was thinking like, how am I going to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with hers? And I was thinking maybe that’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll like, you know, I’ll plug in like, you know, an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSD that’s big big enough, just export all of her originals as one giant folder, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write that script to break up hers into the 100GB chunks. Anyway, so, how I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was I made a smart album with a date captured range for each disc.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BDXL1, BDXL2, etc. And each one I wrote, you know, I labeled the discs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the date range I covered. The problem is to actually make this 100GB from that perspective, or from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that workflow, You can’t, as far as I can tell, Apple Photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, there’s not an easy way to tell what is the size of the modified originals of this album.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fortunately, there’s another app called Power Photos. This is a third-party app that reads your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Photos library, you can do stuff with it. And one of the things it does is if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco click on a smart album, it’ll tell you in the sidebar how big it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, that’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is it’s not super accurate. Like, I guess when you actually export
⏹️ ▶️ Marco originals, it’s exporting something in some kind of format sometimes that it ends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up being larger than Power Photos thought it would be. So sometimes I have to like check Power Photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do the export, see oh, it’s actually 107 gigs now, and then go back, cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month off the date range, do it again. So there’s probably a better way to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said, put them on desk and write a script.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think your way-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Be a programmer,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t be there slumming it with these photo editing apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s that’s probably the right approach. And as you clarify to me, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because APFS does not make a copy of the data, if it doesn’t need to make a copy of the data,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you export unmodified originals on the same drive on your your main SSD, probably when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do that, you don’t need like a terabyte of space extra because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already on the disk. So it’s just basically creating a whole bunch of pointers to the original files in the photo library.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s one thing I didn’t realize when I first started. I thought the reason I would have to do it this way was because I didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a terabyte free. And it turns out, no, when you export things, they don’t take up any space.
⏹️ ▶️ John With the caveat that there is an API to do that. And if you are using some other program
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t use the correct or expected Apple APIs for efficiently
⏹️ ▶️ John copying things in APFS, you could end up not getting a clone. Everything from Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. The Finder does it. I guess Photos does it too. but I would test it first before assuming just every program that
⏹️ ▶️ John you run on APFS does this. The file system has the capability, but not every
⏹️ ▶️ John program will take advantage of that capability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, especially if you’re using shell scripts and using like CP or Rsync, I think by default those don’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that Apple’s built in, yeah, I think Apple’s built in CP might do it by default. Again, you can test this
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself, but those things change, but yeah, just it’s worth testing, but yes, that’s one of the magical abilities
⏹️ ▶️ John of APFS. I take advantage of it all the time because my disk would be massively full if I couldn’t do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, so I’ve burned 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disks so far, I think. One of them was bad. And I was kind of curious, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m burning a disk, I’m like, should I take it easy on the computer? Like, remember buffer underruns?
⏹️ ▶️ John with CD-ROM? Like, don’t touch the computer. It’s burning a disk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like, I was actually worried. Like, should I? Like, is this a concern I should have with modern disk burning? You should open 300 windows. Right, yeah. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, should I not run Xcode? because it’s kind of heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Should I not play music because it makes the desk vibrate slightly? I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ John am a little bit iffy about Xcode. I do, I have to confess, I do quit Xcode sometimes before I podcast. Just like if
⏹️ ▶️ John something’s going to mess with this stuff. Wait, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco quit things? Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to believe. But
⏹️ ▶️ John not because I need the RAM, but I’m like, you know what? Xcode does all sorts of weird stuff. And the most thing related to that, actually, is I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John getting a bunch of errors in my web browser today that said, er, network changed in Chrome, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve seen that one. And I’m pretty sure it was Docker. I’m pretty sure it was Docker because
⏹️ ▶️ John Docker runs this thing with, you know, Docker of course does also know the working shenanigans. I’ll let you know tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’ve been doing, I’ve been doing development on the ATP CMS with my Docker image. That means that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m constantly running Docker, which means that Chrome occasionally gives you this network change error. It may be something else. I don’t know. It
⏹️ ▶️ John might be the HTTP2 service attack affecting Google properties, but more
⏹️ ▶️ John on this in future episodes. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so, I still don’t really know like, the tolerance of what you can do on your computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while it’s burning and not mess up the disk. The one that was bad, when I put it, so these are officially like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4x speed, and of course the X’s don’t mean the same thing as X’s for like DVDs and CDs, they’re all different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, the disks say 6x speed, but when you put them in, Finder says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4x speed maximum. So I’m like, okay, whatever. And by the way, and burning disk support is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still built into Finder. Like this is like, you don’t need a separate app to burn the disks. You insert the blank disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Finder just gives you a thing in the favorites sidebar in Finder windows called Untitled BD. And you just drag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff to it, it has the like the little nuclear icon that all burn disks have had forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You drag stuff to it, when you’re ready you go there and you hit burn. It’s great, it works just fine. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it burns and then does a read verify pass, so it actually reads the data back to make sure it actually wrote correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s great, anyway. The bad disk, instead of saying 4x, it said 2x.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, Finder would only read it, would only say, would only do it at 2x. I thought, that’s kind of odd, so I ejected it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I put it back in, and the second time, it read 4x as usual. So I think there might have just been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something funky about that disk, so, anyway. The other thing about this process is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4x, in practice, now I tried looking up what these speeds mean on Wikipedia, and Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco says it should be a 96 minute time to burn a whole 100 gig disk at that speed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually takes me 128 minutes, and then another 100 or so minutes to verify.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it actually takes about four hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to burn and verify read a full 100 gig Blu-ray disk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, that’s not, I mean look, so the reality is like what I would do is I would just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every night for a week, I would just, right before I was going to bed, I’d put in a blank disk. I already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the folders all prepared of what went on each disk. So, all right, put in the next one, drag it over,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit burn, go to bed. Wake up in the morning, it’s ready.
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you using to burn them, by the way? Did I miss what you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco said? Finder, just Finder.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, it’s, to talk about functionality, it’s been sitting in Finder for ages that
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have not a lot of faith in, but hey, if it’s working for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it didn’t do the read verify pass, I would have a lot less faith in it. I’m very glad it does that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, but yeah, so it, it works, it works just fine and it’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow, but I am actually very happy I had this option because now, you know, so now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have these, these two small boxes of blu-ray discs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re, they’re both protected. I got the jewel cases for each one, like, so like instead of a spindle, like they’re all in jewel cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I got, I now have this, this, this small set of blue radius that I can like put in a fire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safe box or a safe deposit box or just some kind of safe storage somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can actually have my family photos and I know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if everything goes wrong in my digital life, I still have this backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m gonna do important documents, I’m gonna do my source code here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the most part, this is long-term archival stuff because they’re write once discs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it actually is, I think, a useful option to know about. This is not for everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s even barely for nerds. But if for some reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might be interesting to you, it’s an option worth knowing about, that you can get 100 gigs per disc
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a disc that lasts basically your entire lifetime fairly easily, that’s pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not, again, this is not a common need, but for stuff like family photos, I think it’s a